Semantic Thesaurus: quickly identify search terms for queries

For any search or monitoring activity, the sources need to be balanced by the keywords used to find or retrieve information.  As a general rule, the wider the subjects covered by the sources or search engine, the tighter and more precise the query will need to be.  

Defining the words you will need to include in your query can take time.  You need to collect and compare what you’ve got with what you were expecting to get.  The amount of time you need to spend here depends how much information is available on your subject and how quickly you can process it.

Digimind Intelligence has a built-in semantic thesaurus, specially designed to help you identify the keywords you’ll need to put into your queries.

Simple Queries

Some queries can be built using a few keywords only.  A good example of such a query is one used to track a specific person, brand name or company name.

Complex Queries

Other types of query need to be developed with synonymes.  This will help you to pick up and detect a wider range of information.  This is useful when tracking a subject area.  For example for a project looking at intensive farming:

Some queries need to restrict noise or unwanted information.  In this case you might want to add in words to eliminate certain stories from your agent’s alerts or DCF results.

DI.12: In-Built Semantic Thesaurus

To help our users work more quickly when preparing queries, we have developed an easy-to-access thesaurus.  It is accessible from inside the query builder (either for an agent, or for an entity on a list).  Click on the semantic thesaurus button to open it.

The thesaurus will open and you will be able to start developing your query.

Enter the keyword you would like to reinforce and then click on the search button or magnifying glass.  You can choose to run the semantic thesaurus in English or in French.

You will then see the results:

Using sophisticated algorithms, Digimind will present four types of words:

1. semantic field: associated words from the same semantic field
2. hyponyms: alternative or replacement words (competitor names, technical words, brand names, etc.)
3. synonymes: including groups of words
4. grammatical: plurals

Depending on the word you have chosen to investigate, the number of columns will vary:

In this case, there are no synonyms for “Samsung”.

You can select to investigate multi-word terms, using “ “.

When you click on "add" by the side of the word you will be able to select how you would like to include this term in the query: AND, OR or NOT.

The word will then be added to the query and you can continue working through the suggestions in the semantic thesaurus.