Developing an NLP Semantic Search

May 15, 2015

Can you imagine a natural language processing semantic search engine? It would be a lovely tool to use in your daily routines and make research a bit easier. If you are working on such a project and are making a progress, keep at that startup because this is lucrative field at the moment. Over at Stack Overflow, an entrepreneuring spirit is trying to develop a “Semantic Search With NLP And Elasticsearch”:

“I am experimenting with Elasticsearch as a search server and my task is to build a “semantic” search functionality. From a short text phrase like “I have a burst pipe” the system should infer that the user is searching for a plumber and return all plumbers indexed in Elasticsearch.

Can that be done directly in a search server like Elasticsearch or do I have to use a natural language processing (NLP) tool like e.g. Maui Indexer. What is the exact terminology for my task at hand, text classification? Though the given text is very short as it is a search phrase.”

Given that this question was asked about three years ago, a lot has been done not only with Elasticsearch, but also NLP. Search is moving towards a more organic experience, but accuracy is often muddled by different factors. These include the quality of the technology, classification, taxonomies, ads in results, and even keywords (still!).

NLP semantic search is closer now than it was three years ago, but technology companies would invest a lot of money in a startup that can bridge the gap between natural language and machine learning.

Whitney Grace, May 15, 2015

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Analytics, News, Search, Search quality, Semantic, Technology

Comments

One Response to “Developing an NLP Semantic Search”

John O'Gorman on May 17th, 2015 9:02 pm

“…, but technology companies would invest a lot of money in a startup that can bridge the gap between natural language and machine learning.”

I have the second part of that equation, Whitney…do you have access to the first?

Thanks,

John O’Gorman
Principal and Chief Disambiguation Officer
Quantum Semantics Inc

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.