Re: Search accuracy

Nick Arnett (narnett@Verity.COM)
Thu, 4 Apr 1996 11:01:45 -0800


>A true semantic network ... does not
>force the user to make the precision/recall tradeoff. Yes, the semantic
>network does boost recall by building in literally millions of word links (so,
>stock is linked to equity, share, trade, bond, security, etc.). However,
>unlike a thesaurus, or any other tool used in search engines today, the
>semantic network also lets you specify word meaning. Thus, you can specify a
>search on stock as "shares issued by a company...," telling the system to
>ignore references to soup stock, live stock, retail stock, etc.

If there exists a search technology that is so accurate that it never finds
irrelevant documents and always finds all of the relevant ones, we'd like
to buy it. Any time you ask a more accurate question of a good search
engine, you'll get more accurate results, regardless of whether you're
using a "true" semantic network, knowledgebase, Cliff Notes or anything
else that helps define the concept on which you searching.

In any event, this isn't the place to flog our products, features, etc.

One of the things that I'd find really interesting would be research into
the construction of semantic networks or other knowledgebases from Web
topology. That would be a fascinating byproduct of a spider's
explorations. I only know of one experiment along those lines, being done
by one of our customers. Anyone else looking at this?

Nick