Google: Regular Search Not Up to Covid19 Queries. Who Knew?

May 15, 2020

Google has launched a new semantic search tool designed to help researchers fight this pandemic. The Google AI Blog reveals “An NLU-Powered Tool to Explore COVID-19 Scientific Literature.” As one might expect, researchers around the world have been turning out an enormous number of papers on the disease and how we might fight it. Why does this call for a special tool? Google researcher Keith Hall writes:

“Traditional search engines can be excellent resources for finding real-time information on general COVID-19 questions like ‘How many COVID-19 cases are there in the United States?’, but can struggle with understanding the meaning behind research-driven queries. Furthermore, searching through the existing corpus of COVID-19 scientific literature with traditional keyword-based approaches can make it difficult to pinpoint relevant evidence for complex queries. To help address this problem, we are launching the COVID-19 Research Explorer, a semantic search interface on top of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), which includes more than 50,000 journal articles and preprints.”

Based on the BERT technology recently injected into the general Google Search, this bespoke semantic AI has been trained on biomedical literature. The team chose to build a hybrid term-neural retrieval model for this platform—a combination of keyword search and neural retrieval; see the article for the technical details. Here’s how the search functions:

“When the user asks an initial question, the tool not only returns a set of papers (like in a traditional search) but also highlights snippets from the paper that are possible answers to the question. The user can review the snippets and quickly make a decision on whether or not that paper is worth further reading. If the user is satisfied with the initial set of papers and snippets, we have added functionality to pose follow-up questions, which act as new queries for the original set of retrieved articles.”

The open-alpha platform is available for free to the research community, and Google plans to continue refining the system over the next few months. May this tool help scientists find solutions that much faster.

Cynthia Murrell, May 15, 2020

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Google, News, Search

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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.