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Sun Labs: Conceptual Indexing/Retrieval Examples

Examples

Introduction Key Ideas Examples
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color change
The conceptual taxonomy makes it possible to find specific concepts that are subsumed by a general request. For example, in a taxonomy of bug-descriptions, the query color change subsumes the concepts:
  • becomes black
  • reset bitmap colors
  • color disruption

This technology integrates general linguistic information with taxonomic subsumption. For example,

  • linguistic morphological analysis

    disruption is derived from disrupt

  • lexical taxonomic subsumption

    to disrupt is to damage
    to damage is to change

Using this kind of knowledge to connect query phrases with phrases occurring in text makes it much easier to find what your looking for.
SunExpress Catalog
Querying a conceptual taxonomy to find relevant phrases and then looking at passages where those phrases occur can be an effective way to find what you need. For example, with a conceptual index of the SunExpress Catalog, a catalog of products for Unix(TM) computers, the query "add memory" returned the following structure of subsumed concepts:

Query: (ADD MEMORY) 

(ADD MEMORY)
  |-k- (ADDITIONAL MEMORY)
  | |-k- (ADDITIONAL A MEMORY)
  | |-k- (ADDITIONAL G MEMORY)
  | |-k- (ADDITIONAL K MEMORY)
  | |-k- (ADDITIONAL STORAGE)
  | |  |-k- (ADDITIONAL DISK)
  | |    |-k- (ADDITIONAL DISKS)
  | |    | |-k- (TWO ADDITIONAL HARD DISKS)
  | |    |
  | |    |-k- (ADDITIONAL MULTI-DISK)
  | |      |-k- (ADDITIONAL 4.2-GB MULTI-DISK)
  | |      |
  | |      |-k- (ADDITIONAL SMCC MULTI-DISK)
  | |
  | |-k- (PURCHASE ADDITIONAL MEMORY)
  |
  |-k- (ECONOMICALLY ADDING LOCAL STORAGE)
  |-k- (SOLDERED-IN MEMORY)
Each of these concepts (with the possible exception of the query phrase itself) is a phrase that occurs somewhere in the SunExpress catalog and was automatically extracted and indexed. The display shows the organization of these concepts according to their subsumption relationships, with more specific concepts occurring lower and to the right. In particular the query subsumes the concept: 
       (ECONOMICALLY ADDING LOCAL STORAGE)
based on the fact that a disk is a kind of storage.

Looking up this phrase in the text results in a display of the following passage (with the relevant phrase highlighted with italics):

    Sun's new 535 MB 3.5-Inch SCSI-2 Disk Drive offers much higher performance and more capacity at a lower cost/MB than the 424 MB drive it replaces. It is ideal for economically adding local storage to desktop SPARCsystems.
Knowledge Technology Group, Sun Microsystems Laboratories

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