Text Analytics

This section describes IDOL functions that allow you to expand your queries to get more value out of your data.

Automatic Query Guidance (AQG)

IDOL can find the most important topics and phrases in a document set, and automatically cluster these terms and phrases. You can use the clustered phrases to provide a hierarchical set of queries that guide your users to the result area that they are looking for.

Dynamic Thesaurus

When it processes queries, IDOL can automatically suggest alternative queries, allowing users to quickly produce a variety of relevant result sets.

Highlight Results

IDOL can automatically highlight search terms, phrases, and proximity expressions in results, by using an HTML tag that you can easily display in your user interface.

You can also highlight documents when you use near-native viewing (see View Documents), for example to provide a highlighted document preview in your search application.

Query Manipulation

IDOL query manipulation can automatically modify and expand user queries and manipulate the results set that returns, and apply and return promotions as part of queries. The IDOL Query Manipulation Server (QMS) allows you to:

  • generate promotions from search results.

  • query for promotions.

  • ensure that documents appear at desired locations in a results list.

  • boost results.

  • expand queries to include results from synonymous terms.

  • remove particular terms from queries.

Search Filters (Parametric Search)

IDOL can use fields in your documents to provide filters for your searches.

When you index documents, IDOL creates and stores information about the values in fields that you define as parametric fields (that is, fields you want to use for search filtering).

You can use an IDOL query to find all the values that appear in a particular parametric field, and provide these values as general search filters for your users. You can also find only those values for a particular parametric field that occur in documents that match a user search, to allow users to refine their search with these more specific filters.

Filtering uses the same principles as FieldText search (see FieldText Search), using a special query to find all possible values of a particular field to provide a filter menu is unique to parametric fields.

Spectrographic Analysis

IDOL can produce visualizations based on the categorization and clustering that it performs (see Categorization and Cluster Information). The spectrograph allows you to track how clusters change over time when your data is being continually updated. For example, if you ingest news items, the spectrograph can show you how news stories continue, branch into substories, and disappear over time.

Spelling Correction

IDOL can automatically check the spelling in the query text it receives and suggest correct spelling for terms that its dictionary does not contain.