Recap of Activate 2018
This article is been a bit late, but better late than never. Activate was a fantastic conference, and Lucidworks and the Montreal Sheraton were gracious hosts. These are a…
Relevance Engineering is Here to Stay: Haystack EU 2018 Recap
Thanks Flax and Rene Kriegler for partnering to plan a tremendous Haystack EU event in early October. It was gratifying to see the relevance community come together. I love…
Think AI will solve your search problems? Ask these questions first
It’s understandable to be frustrated with search. You’ve probably heard someone like OSC lecturing you on relevance best practices, taxonomies, metrics, measurement, and more. You’ve probably thought “wow that’s…
The Missing Hello World for OpenNLP
I wrote this back in 2012 for version 1.5.2-incubating, and never published it. So I’m updating it for the October 2018 version of OpenNLP, 1.9.0. Visit http://opennlp.apache.org/ and you…
Exploring Solr’s OpenNLP Integrations
We’ve focused most of our conversation about machine learning and search on Learning to Rank (LTR), but LTR isn’t the only machine learning tool in the Solr/Elasticsearch toolbox. LTR…
Sub-phrase Highlighting in Solr
We wanted Solr to use its ability to do subphrase matching (pf2, pf3) to procedurally generate richer, contiguous highlighting snippets. Unfortunately, we reached a dead end in our efforts…
Enterprise Data World 2018 Recap
In April I went on a pilgrimage to Enterprise Data World to encourage my colleagues in the Data world who typically are focused on issues of Data Governance, Data…
Why We Created Search Relevance Training
I am a big proponent of Solr and Elasticsearch search engines BUT… … they are frameworks. A bag of tools. I can teach you how they fit together in…
Reflective Search Relevance Testing
Many organizations find relevance testing frustrating. Often we start consulting engagements and the first problem we have to solve is “how do we test search relevance?” In this article…
How to Implement a Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) Ranking Quality Scorer in Quepid
Background As a search relevancy engineer at OpenSource Connections (OSC), when I work on a client’s search application, I use Quepid every day! Quepid is a “Test-Driven Relevancy Dashboard”…
Solr Multiterm Synonyms: avoiding sow=false surprises
Many Solr teams have gotten stumped on the sow=false behavior introduced in Solr 7. To review, sow=false (split-on-whitespace=false) changes how the query is parsed. With sow=false the query is…
Haystack Agenda Announced!
Hey, you know you want to come to this awesome search relevance conference! We’ll have talks from companies like LexisNexis, Wikimedia Foundation, Snagajob, Lucidworks, and Elastic! Talks range from…