About Trey

Founder @ Searchkernel, author of
AI-Powered Search and Solr in Action, startup Advisor, researcher/ public speaker on search, relevance & ranking, recommendation systems, and natural language processing.

I was excited to be selected again this year to present at Lucene/Solr Revolution 2015 in Austin, Texas. My talk today focused on one the main areas of focus for me over the last year – building out a highly relevant and intelligent semantic search system. While I described and provided demos on the capabilities of the entire system (and many of the technical details for how someone could implement a similar system), I spent the majority of the time on the core Knowledge Graph we’ve built using Apache Solr to dynamically understand the meaning of any query or document that is provided as search input. This Solr-based Knowledge Graph – combined with a probabilistic, entity-based query parser, a sophisticated type-ahead prediction mechanism, spell checking, and a query-augmentation stage – is core to the Intent Engine we’ve built to be able to search on “things, not strings”, and to truly understand and match based upon the intent behind the user’s search.

Video:

Slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/treygrainger/leveraging-lucenesolr-as-a-knowledge-graph-and-intent-engine

Talk Summary:
Search engines frequently miss the mark when it comes to understanding user intent. This talk will describe how to overcome this by leveraging Lucene/Solr to power a knowledge graph that can extract phrases, understand and weight the semantic relationships between those phrases and known entities, and expand the query to include those additional conceptual relationships. For example, if a user types in (Senior Java Developer Portland, OR Hadoop), you or I know that the term “senior” designates an experience level, that “java developer” is a job title related to “software engineering”, that “portland, or” is a city with a specific geographical boundary, and that “hadoop” is a technology related to terms like “hbase”, “hive”, and “map/reduce”. Out of the box, however, most search engines just parse this query as text:((senior AND java AND developer AND portland) OR (hadoop)), which is not at all what the user intended. We will discuss how to train the search engine to parse the query into this intended understanding, and how to reflect this understanding to the end user to provide an insightful, augmented search experience.

Topics: Semantic Search, Finite State Transducers, Probabilistic Parsing, Bayes Theorem, Augmented Search, Recommendations, NLP, Knowledge Graphs