Sophia Search Co-Founder Speaks
March 1, 2011
Sophia Search offers an alternative to key word retrieval. What’s the secret behind this new system? The Search Wizards Speak series provides some insight into Sophia Search with its most recent interview with Dr. David Patterson.
You can read an exclusive interview with the co-founder of the Belfast, Ireland-based enterprise search vendor Sophia Search on ArnoldIT.com. Dr. Patterson explains his search system’s use of semiotics to discern the meaning of textual information. The result is that a user finds the information required more quickly, thus reducing the need to run multiple queries or plow through a long, laundry list of query results.
In the interview, Dr. Patterson said:
I prefer to call Sophia a “contextual discovery engine.” Sophia can automatically disambiguate the different meanings of words based on their context within a document. In short, Sophia searches by the meaning of what the user is looking for as opposed to just the key words they use in their query. Sophia enables users to discover contextually relevant information they were previously unaware of, and it increases the users’ understanding of their content. One of the benefits of our technical approach is that Sophia operates without human guidance or training, and it does not require taxonomies, ontologies or thesauri.
He added:
Conventional search tools and systems don’t address the discovery component of search. How can the user query for information they don’t know exists? Finally, we were fascinated by solving what we call “the context problem”. Most systems simply do not understand the context of information. Therefore, most search and retrieval systems provide a lot of irrelevant hits to the user. Sophia is all about context and providing users with relevant information in the right context. It is about understanding the meaning of what the user is looking for, not simply returning lists of documents just because they contain the user’s query terms.
You can examine a screen shot of the Sophia Search output along with Dr. Patterson’s comments about the system and method used in this enterprise search system.
You can get the full text of the interview at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, March 1, 2011
Freebie
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
