Natural Language Search with Knowledge Graphs

Trey Grainger • Location: Theater 4 • Back to Haystack 2019

To optimally interpret most natural language queries, it is necessary to understand the phrases, entities, commands, and relationships represented or implied within the search. Knowledge graphs serve as useful instantiations of ontologies which can help represent this kind of knowledge within a domain.

In this talk, we'll walk through techniques to build knowledge graphs automatically from your own domain-specific content, how you can update and edit the nodes and relationships, and how you can seamlessly integrate them into your search solution for enhanced query interpretation and semantic search. We'll have some fun with some of the more search-centric use cased of knowledge graphs, such as entity extraction, query expansion, disambiguation, and pattern identification within our queries: for example, transforming the query "bbq near haystack" into


{ 
  filter:["doc_type":"restaurant"], 
  "query": {
    "boost": {
      "b": "recip(geodist(38.034780,-78.486790),1,1000,1000)", 
      "query": "bbq OR barbeque OR barbecue"
      }
  }
}

We'll also specifically cover use of the Semantic Knowledge Graph, a particularly interesting knowledge graph implementation available within Apache Solr that can be auto-generated from your own domain-specific content and which provides highly-nuanced, contextual interpretation of all of the terms, phrases and entities within your domain. We'll see a live demo with real world data demonstrating how you can build and apply your own knowledge graphs to power much more relevant query understanding within your search engine.

Trey Grainger

Lucidworks

Trey is the Chief Algorithms Officer at Lucidworks, where he drives vision and practical application of intelligent data science algorithms to power relevant search experiences for hundreds of the worlds biggest and brightest companies. He is also the co-author of Solr in Action, plus more than a dozen additional books, journal articles, and research publications covering industry-leading approaches to semantic search, recommendation systems, and intelligent information retrieval systems. Trey received his Masters in Management of Technology from Georgia Tech, studied Computer Science, Business, and Philosophy at Furman University, and studied Information Retrieval and Web Search at Stanford University.