Semantic analysis of travel reviewsto understand feelings

Sept 17

, 2007

"Don't cry for me,Google"

Let me tell you...Iwould highlyrecommend thatunless you are aparty animal, aheavy drinker I would not letmy dog tosearch atGoogleMy dog is better behaved thanmost kids I sawin this hotelI ate a 3.5 pound lobster for just $16.99at the seafood restaurant inside the hotelwhich is the only thing I felt good about.

Boris GalitskyKango.com

Conventional search engines

•Deliver documents which includesignificant occurrences of keywordsin user queries.

•Additionally, Google is goodat selecting thosedocumentswhich has satisfied usersinprevious similar searches.•Powerset is trying tounderstandlinguistic linksbetween words in queriesand documents•While this works well enoughfor general horizontalsearches,verticalsearchesfor specific kinds of productscan do much better.

Horizontal (about everything)

By using domainknowledge (ontology)

Ontologies for vertical search

•Computers cannot really “know” what each word “means”•However, we can teachthem how entities arerelated to each other •In a vertical search, for every word (or entity,denoted by it) thereshould be codedrelationships with other words•Then the index for eachdocument containsmultiple inter-relatedentities: skeleton of adocument for searchDive in Monterey

activityRelationship = ‘performed at’location

dive - boatdive - lessondive – deep - oxygen