Verity and default delimiters

[Nick Arnett]

At 07:12 PM 6/16/97 -0700, Janet Kaul wrote:
>Our company has just purchased Verity search systems (we have been
>using Fulcrum).
>
>While I like most of the functions Verity provides, I am unhappy with
>the fact that the default delimiter between search terms is a comma.
>If you put spaces, a phrase is assumed.

This is only the case if you are using the default parser.  The free text
parser will accrue the query words together, although you lose the ability
to include other operators, since it treats the query as plain text.

We have developed an "Internet style" query parser, which behaves much like
the typical big search services.  It'll ship in the next release of our
products, but we could make it available early to some folks, I'm sure.
This takes advantage of the fact that all of the latest versions of our
product have a plug-in architecture for the query parser, which means that
we have the technical capability to allow anyone to support any existing or
new query language.  It was developed particularly to allow third parties to
add true natural language parsing, using complex semantic lexicons and such.

For those not familiar with Verity, the default operator is "accrue," which
is a fuzzy logic operator that means "the more, the better."  Thus, a list
of words separated by a comma will return results where the top-scoring
documents have the most occurrences of those words and phrases (there are a
few subtleties that I'm glossing over, of course).

Nick

Product Manager, Categorization and Visualization
Verity Inc. -- Connecting People with Information

Phone: 408-542-2164     Fax: 408-541-1600
Home office: 408-733-7613         narnett at verity.com
http://www.verity.com