Concept searching

Concept Searching Limited

Concept Searching Limited is a software company which specializes in information retrieval software. It was founded in 2002, and has office in the UK, USA and South Africa. Its current range of software includes products for enterprise search, Taxonomy Management and statistical classification.

History

Concept Searching was founded in 2002 in the UK. All product development was funded by the founders, who (together with senior staff) continue to own the 100% of the company. There are no external investors. See Company Fact Sheet.

First customer shipments were in 2003, and the company opened offices in the USA during the same year. An office in South Africa was opened in 2006.

In August 2003 the company introduced the idea of using Compound term processing (aka phrase based indexing) via an article published in INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY (VOL 36 PART 4). A British Library Direct catalogue entry can be found here: .

The complete original article can also be downloaded from here: .

Compound Term Processing

Most meaning is expressed in short patterns of words whilst single words in isolation are highly ambiguous. And yet all other statistical information retrieval products work on the basis of single word terms.

Concept Searching is the only company to offer a full range of information retrieval products based on statistical Compound Term Processing. This unique technology automatically identifies the word patterns in unstructured text that convey the most meaning and our products use these higher order terms to improve Precision with no loss of Recall.

The algorithms adapt to each customer's content and they work in any language regardless of vocabulary or linguistic style.

Its interesting to contrast conceptSearching's "Compound Term Processing" with the patents for "Phrase based indexing and retrieval" filed by Anna Lynn Patterson in 2004, and to which Google subsequently acquired the rights. A full discussion of the patents can be found here: Webmaster Woman The patents themselves can be found online, for example: .

Several other companies use the term concept search or concept searching and even conceptsearching, for example: Ontrack Inview and FIOS Inc However, these sources describe quite different techniques to those employed by Concept Searching Limited's "Compound Term Processing". Also SearchExpress defines concept search as simply a list of synonyms!

Most search engines simply look for documents that contain the words that the user enters into the search box (aka "keyword search" engines). Boolean search engines add a degree of sophistication by allowing the user to specify additional requirements but most users struggle to comprehend and use the necessary syntax (e.g. Tiger NEAR Woods AND (golf OR golfing) NOT Volkswagen). Phrase search is easier to understand but can lead to many useful documents being missed if they do not contain the exact phrase specified.

Compound term processing is a new approach to an old problem: how to improve the relevance of search results without missing anything important whilst maintaining ease of use. By forming compound (i.e. multi-word) terms and placing these in the search engine's index the search can be performed with a higher degree of accuracy because the ambiguity inherent in single words is no longer a problem. A search for survival rates following a triple heart bypass will locate documents about this topic even if this precise phrase is not contained in any document. A concept search using "Compound Term Processing" can extract the key concepts automatically (in this case "survival rates" and "triple heart bypass") and use these to select the most relevant documents.

Concept Searching's technology appears to be more adaptive than the "phrase based indexing and retrieval" detailed by Anna Lynn Patterson in her patent applications. The "phrase based indexing" is targeted at searching the World Wide Web where an extensive statistical knowledge of common searches can be used to identify candidate phrases. Concept Searching's approach is more suited to Enterprise Search applications where such a priori knowledge is not available.

Customer Base

Concept Searching's customer base includes many global companies and organizations including: BP, Banca Intesa, Logica, U.S. Air Force Medical Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Concept Searching also has many OEM and Systems Integration partners, including: AT&T Government Solutions, Concentra, Parity, Volocom and Web Labs.

See the detailed U.S. Air Force Medical Service case study here: . This paper was presented at the 20th International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics & Cybernetics, Intelligent Software Tools and Servcies at Baden-Baden, Germany in July 2008 by the U.S. Air Force Medical Service.