Taxonomic Search - a powerful lever for boosting Relevance and understanding query intent

A carefully built, well applied and intuitively surfaced taxonomy can really help us reach the holy grail of search, namely increased recall and precision in results. This talk looks at how we construct taxonomies at LexisNexis that match content volume and user need to provide topics that are granular enough to be actionable, insightful and helpful in decision-making. It covers both rule-based and machine learning classification approaches to content enrichment and demonstrates how we combine these to achieve compelling and differentiating accuracy. It looks at the various ways we have surfaced taxonomy in our products both to enable our users to get to the comprehensive information they want faster and increasingly to drive powerful analytics. Finally, we look to the future and consider how we can increase usage of our taxonomies both explicitly and ‘hands-free’ in our products to continue to boost relevance, improve findability and better understand query intent.

Mark Fea

LexisNexis

Mark Fea is Director of Taxonomy and Lexicon Development at LexisNexis, based in London. He manages a global team, who build and apply many legal and news & business taxonomies as well as curating lexicons to improve search and discovery outcomes across a very broad range of products. He has worked within the taxonomy space at LexisNexis for 17 years and before this in various editorial and information management roles in commercial, academic and government sectors.