Best Practices for Intelligent Search

Be Open to External Innovation

In the context of becoming information-driven, an open platform means customers can leverage their own vocabularies, ontologies and taxonomies in order to accelerate deployments. They can also leverage specialized ontologies from third parties, which can be used during ingestion to enrich documents as well as at query time to enhance the user experience.

Invest in Self-Learning

As we know, Machine Learning (ML) is becoming increasingly critical to enhance and improve the relevance of information provided to end users. This is done during ingestion but also constantly in the background as humans interact with the system. The reason ML has become essential in recent years is that it can handle complexity beyond what’s possible with rules. ML helps organizations become information-driven by:

♦ Analyzing and structuring content to both enrich and extract concepts such as entities and relationships, which can subsequently be used for further enrichment and human navigation

♦ Modifying results through usage, essentially incorporating human behavior into the calculation of relevance

♦ Providing recommendations based on both what is in the content (content-based) and by examining users’ interactions (collaborative filtering).

Align Solution with End User Goals

Most organizations striving to be information-driven want to end up with an intelligent agent that employees can consult for institutional knowledge that can be readily applied to the task or situation at hand. However, even the most intelligent of agents will not be useful without a well-designed user experience. So, what is good design? At Sinequa, we know that good design is aesthetically pleasing and understandable in that it makes use of the user’s intuition. We also know that good design is unobtrusive and perhaps most importantly, that good design is contextual to the user’s goals.

Conclusion

These are some of the best practices for becoming information-driven using AI-powered search, which Sinequa has observed while building our platform and working with large customers within knowledge-intensive industries. At Sinequa, we believe these practices, intelligently applied, serve as the primary enablers for organizations seeking to become information-driven.