[SPTUsers] SPT Search results

[Michael McFadden]

The admin is the only one that can add to the stop words and synonym list
because they are both just text files on the server that the program has a
reference to.  Also from what I understand the search isn't slowed in our
situation because the stop words and synonym files are used during the
building of the index.  The indexing of resources and their keywords takes a
little longer, however the search function takes about the same amount of
time.


That sounds interesting. Can each user add to the
synonym list, or is it entered by the admin only?

Should not be too difficult to implement, but it will
probably slow down the search considerably. Has this
happened in your experience?

PC
--- Michael McFadden <mmcfadden at mtc-inc.com> wrote:
> Typically we have created our own synonyms file for
> software we have used in
> the past.  It has been relevant to the information
> we added to our knowledge
> management system.  Creating a synonym file large
> enough to fit every
> solution would require more time than it is worth
> and wouldn't be very
> useful to specific implementations.  If somehow SPT
> was installed with an
> empty synonyms file that users can use how and if
> they wish would be a
> perfect solution.  With the type of data we will be
> putting into SPT it
> would be extremely useful to have.  The previous
> statements also apply for
> stop words.  A lot of our users aren't technical in
> nature and don't
> understand that potentially every word in a query
> will have an effect on the
> results.  However if I were to choose one over the
> other, synonyms would be
> the most useful in making searches more relevant.
>
> On Wed, Apr 09, at 12:57:45PM, Michael McFadden
> wrote:
> > Are there any stop words file to not allow words
> like "a" "to" "and" etc
> to
> > mess up the relevance of a search?  Also is there
> a way to setup synonyms
> so
> > that for example a search for the word "church"
> would also return results
> > with "synagogue" or "cathedral"?
>
>    Stop words are used by the recommender system,
> but the search engine does
>    not support stop words or synonyms at this time.
>
>    As to stop words, the assumption was that users
> would specify search
> terms
>    they thought were relevant, rather than type in a
> question or sentence.
>
>    For synonyms, an issue was that they can be
> problematic because there is
>    an implicit assumption as to the intended use of
> the word.  For example,
>    if the user enters "tone", do we also return
> results for "pitch" and
>    "timbre", or "attitude" and "manner", or "hue"
> and "shade", or "vigor"
> and
>    "elasticity", or all of the above?  If the
> assumptions are off by even a
>    bit, it's easy to return a lot of search results
> that seem irrelevant to
>    the user, and obscure meaningful results.
>
>    In the case of both stop words and synonyms we
> chose the path that seemed
>    to provide the most accurate and understandable
> results for the user.  I
>    expect that we'll revisit both of these issues in
> the future, and will
>    likely add support for both in some fashion in a
> future software release.
>
>    Ed
>
>
> --
>    Edward Almasy
> ealmasy at scout.wisc.edu
>    Research Director
>   1308 W Dayton Street
>    Internet Scout Project
>       Madison WI 53706
>    Computer Sciences Department
>   608-262-6606 (voice)
>    University of Wisconsin - Madison
>     608-265-9296 (fax)
> _______________________________________________
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