

You can use Concept searching to find information without a precisely phrased query by applying a block of text against the database to find documents that have similar conceptual content. This can help prioritize or find important documents.
Concept searching is very different from keyword or metadata search. A concept search performed in Analytics reveals conceptual matches between the query and the document quickly and efficiently, so you can focus on the concepts that you deem important. The following table illustrates the differences between standard searching and concept searching.
Standard Method | Analytics Method |
---|---|
Finds the presence (or absence) of a query (term or block of text) |
Derives the potential meaning of a query |
Simply looks for matches of query and indexed docs |
Attempts to understand semantic meaning and context of terms |
Incorporates Boolean logic |
Incorporates mathematics |
With standard Keyword Search, people frequently experience “term mismatch,” where they use different terms to describe the same thing.
Using concept searching, you can submit a query that is anywhere between a sentence to an entire document's length and return documents that contain the concept the query expresses. Using a single word for a query is not recommended as the results can be broad and unreliable. The match isn't based on any one specific term in the query or the document. The query and document may share terms, or they may not, but they share conceptual meaning.
Every term in a conceptual index has a position vector in the concept space. Every searchable document also has a vector in the concept space. These vectors, when close together, share a correlation or conceptual relationship. Increased distance indicates a decrease in correlation or shared conceptuality. Two items that are close together share conceptuality, regardless of any specific shared terms.
During concept searching, you create text that illustrates a single concept (called the concept query), and then submit it to the index for temporary mapping into the concept space. The conceptual analytics index uses the same mapping logic to position the query into the concept space as with the searchable documents.
Once the position of the query is established, the Analytics index locates documents that are close to it and returns those as conceptual matches. The document that is closest to the query is returned with the highest conceptual score. This indicates distance from the query, not percentage of relevancy—a higher score means the document is closer to the query, thus it is more conceptually related.
You can use concept searches in conjunction with keyword searches or dtSearches. Since a keyword can have multiple meanings, you can use a concept search to limit keyword search or dtSearch results by returning only documents that contain the keyword used in similar conceptual contexts.
The following are benefits of concept searching:
Note the following special considerations about running conceptual analytics operations:
Object Security | Tab Visibility |
---|---|
| Documents |
To run a concept search from the viewer, perform the following steps:
Once the operation is executed, the Documents list pane opens and displays the Concept Search tab, which contains documents that contain the concept the query expresses. This tab contains the following information about the results:
The search text is automatically added to a textbox, which you can edit and then click Search to update your results.
The results are sorted by rank. The minimum concept rank used for the concept search is 60. This value isn't configurable.
Note: The rank measures the conceptual distance between the query text and the searchable documents in the conceptual index. The higher the rank, the higher the relevance to the query. A rank of 100 represents the closest possible distance. The rank doesn't indicate the percentage of shared terms or the percentage of the document that isn't relevant.
Once the conceptual analytics operation is executed, the following takes place:
Once the conceptual analytics operation is executed, the following takes place:
If you have more than one active index, the Select Index icon displays in the upper-right of the card. The oldest active index (lowest Artifact ID) is chosen by default. To change indexes, click on the Select Index icon and select a different active index from the drop-down menu.
To run a concept search, perform the following steps:
The (Index Search) window opens.
Note: Enter a block of text, rather than a single word to get better results. Single word entries return broad, unreliable results. A good example source might be a hot document from your workspace, a complaint for the case, or an excerpted paragraph from a relevant web article.
Note: To stop a long running search, click Cancel Request.
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