Semantic search – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Published August 18, 2010 | 
">Bruce WhealtonFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, searchseeks to improve by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. lists “11 approaches that join semantics to search”[1], and Hildebrand et al. [2] provide an overview that lists and identifies other uses of semantics in the .
Guha et al.[3] distinguish two major forms of search: Navigational and Research. In , the user is using the as a to navigate to a particular intended document. Semantic Search is not applicable to navigational searches. In Research Search, the user provides the with a phrase which is intended to denote an object about which the user is trying to gather/research information. There is no particular document which the user knows about that s/he is trying to get to. Rather, the user is trying to locate a number of documents which together will give him/her the information s/he is trying to find. Semantic Search lends itself well here.
Rather than using ranking algorithms such as ‘s to predict relevancy, Semantic Search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language, to produce highly relevant . In most cases, the goal is to deliver the information queried by a user rather than have a user sort through a list of loosely related keyword results.
Other authors primarily regard as a set of techniques for retrieving knowledge from richly structured data sources like ontologies as found on the Semantic Web [4]. Such technologies enable the formal articulation of domain knowledge at a high level of expressiveness and could enable the user to specify his intent in more detail at query time.
[edit] Disambiguation
In order to understand what a user is searching for, word sense disambiguation must occur. When a term is ambiguous, meaning it can have several meanings (for example, if one considers the lemma “bark“, which can be understood as “the sound of a dog,” “the skin of a tree,” or “a three-masted sailing ship”), the disambiguation process is started, thanks to which the most probable meaning is chosen from all those possible.
Such processes make use of other information present in a semantic analysis system and takes into account the meanings of other words present in the sentence and in the rest of the text. The determination of every meaning, in substance, influences the disambiguation of the others, until a situation of maximum plausibility and coherence is reached for the sentence. All the fundamental information for the disambiguation process, that is, all the knowledge used by the system, is represented in the form of a , organized on a conceptual basis.
In a structure of this type, every lexical concept coincides therefore with a node and is linked to others by specific semantic relationships in a hierarchical and hereditary structure. In this way, each concept is enriched with the characteristics and meaning of the nearby nodes.
Every node of the network (called Synset) groups a set of synonyms which represent the same lexical concept (called Synsets) and can contain:
- single lemmata (‘seat’, ‘vacation’; ‘work’, ‘quick’; ‘quickly’, ‘more’, etc.)
- compounds (‘non-stop’, ‘abat-jour’, ”)
- collocations (‘credit card’, ‘university degree’, ‘treasury stock’, ‘go forward’, etc.).
The semantic relationships (links), which identify the semantic relationships between the synsets, are the order principals for the organization of the concepts.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
Several scientific events cover the topic of explicitly, such as the Semantic Search 2008 Workshop at ESWC’08 and the Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval at ECIR’08.
[show] Semantic Web
[show] Internet search Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_search“
Semantic Search offers more intelligent searching of the web. This is great for research or finding what is out on the web when you don’t already know what you want or are seeking. This is the web 3.0, the semantic web about which I have been writing recently. Semantics deals with the science of meaning in language. As a writer, poet and technology person, I find this very fascinating.
Bruce Whealton
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