Synonym breaks search! How? Why is this important? What synonym is and how it breaks search will be explained with real-world examples. AI-based solutions are proposed, and relevant standards are identified. How synonym solutions should be used for search are explained. Learn what you can do yourself. Tools help, but it doesn’t have to be complicated, nor expensive. It is as straight forward as setting priorities!

1. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Synonymy and AI
Monday 4 October 2021
Jay Ven Eman, Ph.D., CEO
Access Innovations, Inc. / Data Harmony
j_ven_eman@accessinn.com
www.accessinn.com
+1.505.998.0800
Albuquerque, NM USA
Access Innovations, Inc.
The Science behind the Semantics™
www.accessinn.com

2. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Synonymy
! A word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same
as another word or phrase in the same language…
! Why is it important?
Synonymy breaks search!
Synonym
! The state of being synonymous.

3. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Non-intuitive Synonyms
! Invasive breast cancer
! Metastatic breast cancer
! Stage IV breast cancer
These all mean the same thing
in MeSH (Medical Subject Headings of the
US National Library of Medicine)

4. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Differences in search results due to synonymy
! Invasive breast cancer: 520 results
! Metastatic breast cancer: 1803 results
! Stage IV breast cancer: 73 results
! Stage IV breast cancer: 46,400,000 results
Lack of Synonymy Control
Breaks Search

5. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Another example
! Organochlorine
! Chlorinated hydrocarbon
!
! Chlorocarbon
!
! Organochloride
Lack of Synonymy Control
Breaks Search

6. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Source: Synonym.com

7. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Kingdom: Plantae
Clade: Tracheophytes
Clade: Angiosperms
Clade: Monocots
Clade: Commelinids
Order: Poales
Family: Poaceae
Subfamily: Panicoideae
Genus: Zea
Species: Z. mays
Scientific classification of Corn
Source: Wikipedia

8. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use search that leverages the
taxonomy with type-ahead &
merged synonymy.
! How do you deal with it?
9531 results

9. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Semantic control and content enrichment
! Controlled vocabularies, authority files, taxonomies,
thesaurus, ontologies, triple stores, and knowledge
graphs
! Follow the standards
" Accepted Structure and Format Use
• ANSI/NISO Z39.19
• ISO2788
• BS5723
• ISO25964 Parts 1 and 2

10. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Beware the confusing terminology
Keyword
Key phrase
Key Term
Thesaurus Term
Taxonomy term
Descriptor
Tag
Preferred term
Use term
Index term
! Controlled vocabulary
! Ontology
! Knowledge organization
System (KOS)
! Thesaurus
! Taxonomy
! Knowledge Graph
! Index
! Semantic enrichment
Refer to the standards!

11. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
What is indexing?
! Computer Science
" The purpose of storing an index is to optimize speed and performance in finding relevant documents for a search query.
" Search engine optimization indexing is the collecting, parsing, and storing of data to facilitate fast and
accurate information retrieval.
" Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics,
and computer science.
" An alternate name for the process in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the Internet is web
indexing.
" Popular engines focus on the full-text indexing of online, natural language documents
! Index data structures
! Search engine architectures vary in the way indexing is performed and in methods of index storage to meet the various
design factors.
" Suffix tree – branching using hash tables saves time and virtual memory
" Inverted index - Stores a list of data or term occurrences in the form of a hash table or binary tree.
" Citation index - Stores the citations or hyperlinks between documents to support citation analysis, a subject
of bibliometrics.
" n-gram index - specifies the length of the term string to support other types of retrieval or text mining
" Document-term matrix Used in latent semantic analysis, stores the occurrences of words in documents in a two-
dimensional sparse matrix.

12. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Information Science Indexing
We live in a world of overlapping synonymy
• Confusion between the indexes we build and the IT people who use
our work
Knowledge organization systems (KOS)
• Bibliographic and database indexing
• Legal indexing
• Periodical and newspaper indexing
• Subject gateways
• Website and metadata indexing

13. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Why Auto
Index?
Tagging records with terms or pointers.
Indexing Makes Records Searchable Online
Discovery
Navigation
Findability
NOT relevance
Why auto
index?

14. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
! Website navigation
! Journal Article indexing
! Peer Review selection
! Conference paper sorting
" For tracks
" For Review
" For attendees personal meeting selection
! And more!
Besides improving search…

15. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
80,000 papers to sort
! Two weeks to
" Accept
" Reject
" Add to tracks
! Add to conference app
" Attendees stated interests
" Deliver tailored content

16. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Some onomatopoeia
Source: Frontier Menu
! Synonym - Cinnamon
! Cinnamon rolls
! Synonym rolls?
! Rolls down hill
! Rolls-Royce
! Friend named Royce

17. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
‘Association’ problem in AI search
! The Synonym – Cinnamon
Challenge
" AI needs extensive training to
avoid taking you down the
proverbial rabbit hole
" Correlations and co-occurrence
! An applied thesauri is key

18. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Semantically Enriching Your Content Helps
! 5% to 10% “improvement”
! Ying-Hsang Liu, “University Metadata and Retrieval: The Death of the Library Catalog?” DC-2016, Copenhagen, Denmark
! One survey:
" 75% higher books sales with more complete metadata
" 34% with just semantic enrichment
! “50% reduction in retrieval time.” The Weather Channel

19. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Our Software and our Team of Experts
! Data Harmony
" XIS (XML Intranet System)®
" M.A.I.® (Machine Aided Indexer)
" Thesaurus Master ®
" Administration Module
" MAIChem
" Smart Submit
MAIstro™
Data Harmony
Suite

20. © 2021. Access Innovations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Clients
Publishing &
Media
Education
Government
Non-profits &
Societies
Health/Pharma
Manufacturing
& Retail

21. Thank you!
Access Innovations, Inc.
The Science behind the Semantics™
www.accessinn.com
Jay Ven Eman, Ph.D., CEO
Access Innovations, Inc. / Data Harmony
j_ven_eman@accessinn.com
www.accessinn.com
+1.505.998.0800
Albuquerque, NM USA