Compound-term processing

Compound-term processing, in information-retrieval, is search result matching on the basis of compound terms. Compound terms are built by combining two or more simple terms; for example, "triple" is a single word term, but "triple heart bypass" is a compound term. Compound-term processing is a new approach to an old problem: how can one improve the relevance of search results while maintaining ease of use? Using this technique, a search for survival rates following a triple heart bypass in elderly people will locate documents about this topic even if this precise phrase is not contained in any document. This can be performed by a concept search, which itself uses compound-term processing. This will extract the key concepts automatically (in this case "survival rates", "triple heart bypass" and "elderly people") and use these concepts to select the most relevant documents. In August 2003, Concept Searching Limited introduced the idea of using statistical compound-term processing. CLAMOUR is a European collaborative project which aims to find a better way to classify when collecting and disseminating industrial information and statistics. CLAMOUR appears to use a linguistic approach, rather than one based on statistical modelling. Techniques for probabilistic weighting of single word terms date back to at least 1976 in the landmark publication by Stephen E. Robertson and Karen Spärck Jones. Robertson stated that the assumption of word independence is not justified and exists as a matter of mathematical convenience. His objection to the term independence is not a new idea, dating back to at least 1964 when H. H. Williams stated that "[t]he assumption of independence of words in a document is usually made as a matter of mathematical convenience". In 2004, Anna Lynn Patterson filed patents on "phrase-based searching in an information retrieval system" to which Google subsequently acquired the rights. Statistical compound-term processing is more adaptable than the process described by Patterson.