Testing Conceptual Search

Now that conceptual search has been enabled, let's try a few tests to see how it works with the sample search collection that is used by the refinement-project.

As a simple test of conceptual search with this sample spelling variation ontolection, re-display the refinement-project project and click the refinement-project link in the left-hand navigation column of the Watson™ Explorer Engine administration tool. A generic Watson Explorer Engine search screen displays. Enter the word railroad in the text area and click Search.

There are two interesting things about these search results:

Two search results are shown, only one of which actually contains the word railroad.
The screen shows a line below the text area at the top that displays your query term. This line reads Your query has been expanded. and provides a Show Expansions link.

Of the two search results, the one that does not contain the word railroad was clearly provided by some mechanism beyond a simple search. Clicking the Show Expansions link at the top of the screen shows the query expansion dialog reveals that the word railway was automatically suggested by the Watson Explorer Engine conceptual search mechanism.

To verify the source of the alternate term, revisit the ontolection-english-spelling-variations ontolection shown in Figure 1. Use a text editor to display the contents of the file examples/data/ontolection-data/us-uk-lexical-variations.xml, which is installed under your Watson Explorer Engine installation directory on the system where Watson Explorer Engine is installed. Search the file for the word railroad, which will show the following section:

<word name="railroad">
  <synonym>railway</synonym>
</word>

This fragment of one of the input files to the default ontolection that is provided by the Watson Explorer Engine shows that the word railway is identified as a spelling variation for the word railroad.

Tip: Because the ontolection-english-spelling-variations ontolection is just a special type of Watson Explorer Engine search collection, you can also verify the source of the alternate term by searching that search collection.

As shown in the snippet from one of the data files used by the sample ontolection that is provided with the Watson Explorer Engine, ontolections use a number of keywords to identify the relationships between the terms that they contain. The next section examines a more complex input file than the list of spelling variations that was used in this section, beginning the process of explaining how to create and use your own ontolection.