[Sigia-l] Natural Language Searching vs Keyword Searching

[Ken Bryson]

can you name the company?  that might let us comment on their technology..

All that aside, because they have the "ability to return AN answer to A
question (caps mine)" doesn't mean they come near the relevancy required to
provide "to return the best answer to the question" asked.

I'd ask them to provide access to the science behind their technology so you
can really judge their claims.

-kb


-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org]On Behalf Of
david_fiorito at vanguard.com
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2004 2:25 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org; sigia-l-admin at asis.org
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] Natural Language Searching vs Keyword Searching


The company pitching natural language search to us talks a lot about the
ability to return an answer to a question rather than a set of links to
pages like a classic keyword search.  I for one am very skeptical of this
kind of claim.  I am especially skeptical since they are trying to sell us
on the idea that we will never need metadata again since their software
can somehow "understand" the content of a page.  The whole thing smells a
little fishy to me - thus the reason for my original post.

Cheers,

Dave






"Ken Bryson" <kbryson at alias.com>
Sent by: sigia-l-admin at asis.org
02/20/2004 12:39 PM


        To:     <sigia-l at asis.org>
        cc:     (bcc: David Fiorito/IT/VGI)
        Subject:        RE: [Sigia-l] Natural Language Searching vs Keyword
Searching







>> Does anyone have any thoughts on the relative merits of these two types
of search?  In >>what context is one more effective that the other?
Pros/Cons of each?  Thoughts?
>>Opinions?

> But if a natural language search returns several hundred or several
thousands of
> documents, then the search is pretty useless. That's when keyword
tagging
becomes
> important.


I don't think it's just a matter of natural language sucks in all
instances
over 10 documents. There's no reason you can't make good use of metadata
and
thesauri AND put a natural language front end search on it.  When you do
that, the differences between natural language and keyword boolean
searching
becomes clear, at least from my own research.

Boolean searches are better for known item searches, and natural language
searches are *sometimes* better for subject searches.  It all really
depends
on the skill, or lack thereof, of the searcher.


-kb

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