Understanding Queries with NER

Ryan Pedela • Back to Haystack 2018

Named entity recognition (NER) can identify search terms as fields or enum values in an index such as brand and location. The identified fields and enum values can be used as additional relevance signals or filters. This talk will demonstrate how to improve relevance for structured or semi-structured data search using NER. It will include practical lessons learned when applied to real-world datasets such as match vs term queries, data formatting, and the minimum training set size.

Ryan Pedela

Ryan Pedela is the founder and CEO of Datalanche, a new SaaS search platform that uses machine learning to dramatically improve relevance. Ryan has over 15 years of experience in the software industry ranging from automated testing of automotive systems to proteomics research. Much of that experience includes cleaning, managing, analyzing, and searching large amounts of data. He has a B.S. in Computer Science and a M.S. in Computer Graphics from Purdue University.