How Regex Patterns Unlock the Next Level of Relevance & Content Findability
Imagine being tasked with extracting valuable information from a set of strings/characters – mainly from names of companies, phone numbers, URLs, ZIP codes, financial reports, etc. The phrase "finding a needle in a haystack" comes to mind, right? But that won't be the case if you know about regular expressions or regex!
Regex is a pattern that defines character combinations using operators to extract data in a text document based on a set of rules. In other words, regex casts an incantation of operators (like . ? + * {} | () [] - ^) and extracts desired results from a massive volume of data.
For instance, you want to filter out the website visits from your corporate network and solely analyze the external visitors or prospects. To achieve this feat, you’ll have to manually compile the IP addresses from a big muddle of data. With regex, it becomes a breezy affair. Let’s say your internal IP addresses range from 198.71.100.1 - 198.71.100.25. Rather than entering all of them, you could simply create a regex like 198\.51\.100\.\d* that matches the entire range of addresses.
Regex is used everywhere – from data pre-processing to NLP, data extraction, pattern matching, web scraping, string parsing, syntax highlighting, and in SearchUnify. Wait, SearchUnify? How, you may ask. This blog entails how regex patterns help admins and search users under the hood. Let’s find out.
Looking at Regex Through Cognitive Search Lens
Organizations turn to intelligent cognitive search to support their data-hungry culture. But sometimes, it may not surface relevant documents due to a lack of search tuning and query boosting. Enter regex.
Regex is the de facto standard for parsing text from large documents. When used in cognitive search, it supports query boosting, improves keyword tuning, and optimizes search relevance. Let me explain with an example.
A document boosted to rank one for "KPI" might not show up at all when its plural sibling "KPIs" is the search query. To boost the doc for both, the admin will have to enter two separate queries manually, unless he knows regex. Instead of entering multiple keywords, he can simply boost the document by entering a regex pattern, i.e., /kpis?/i which will produce the same results for both "KPI" and "KPIs".
Similarly, document X boosted for query "launch" and the pattern "/launch??/i" will boost the document for "launch," "Launch," "LAUNCH," "launches," "LAUNCHES," “Launching,” and several other matching words.
How SearchUnify Leverages Regex Patterns to Augment Search Relevancy
Regex can automate various tedious manual tasks and can be customized to fit your particular use case. But when coupled with SearchUnify's intelligent search, regex can work wonders to amplify keyword boosting, query boosting, and so on.
1. Amp Up Keyword Tuning: SearchUnify admins can use a regex to boost document X for all the forms of character combinations of the query "add checkbox." This means anyone looking for "adding checkbox" or "add checkboxes" will also see document X on top of the results. Additionally, you can enable synonym boost so that if someone uses synonyms like "button bar" or "check box," the experience is still positive.
2. Handling Query Inflexion: With the recent release, SearchUnify admins can cherry-pick the top 10 results for one search term or a whole set of them. This allows the enterprise to boost (subset) documents for a set of query patterns, thus amplifying the success keyword boosting. And oh, you can custom tune based on search clients as well.
3. Testing Your Tuning: It is better to test the waters before jumping right in, right? That's precisely what Test Your Tuning is all about. It enables admins to beta test new tuning in a simulation before implementing it on the search client(s). This ensures it delivers the desired results with no whoopsies for your end-users.
Our Client Improved Deflection Rate from 39% to 50% in Just 3 Months! Want to Know How?
Join Lynette Ledoux, Customer Specialist, SearchUnify, and Cheryl Zupke, Technical Content Developer, Cornerstone InDemand, in a fireside chat to hear the complete story. In the live event, Cheryl will share how the customer success team at SearchUnify worked with her to improve the cumulative case deflection from 39% to 50% in just three months. Register now!
Imagine being tasked with extracting valuable information from a set of strings/characters – mainly from names of companies, phone numbers, URLs, ZIP codes, financial reports, etc. The phrase "finding a needle in a haystack" comes to mind, right? But that won't be the case if you know about regular expressions or regex!
Regex is a pattern that defines character combinations using operators to extract data in a text document based on a set of rules. In other words, regex casts an incantation of operators (like . ? + * {} | () [] - ^) and extracts desired results from a massive volume of data.
For instance, you want to filter out the website visits from your corporate network and solely analyze the external visitors or prospects. To achieve this feat, you’ll have to manually compile the IP addresses from a big muddle of data. With regex, it becomes a breezy affair. Let’s say your internal IP addresses range from 198.71.100.1 - 198.71.100.25. Rather than entering all of them, you could simply create a regex like 198\.51\.100\.\d* that matches the entire range of addresses.
Regex is used everywhere – from data pre-processing to NLP, data extraction, pattern matching, web scraping, string parsing, syntax highlighting, and in SearchUnify. Wait, SearchUnify? How, you may ask. This blog entails how regex patterns help admins and search users under the hood. Let’s find out.
Looking at Regex Through Cognitive Search Lens
Organizations turn to intelligent cognitive search to support their data-hungry culture. But sometimes, it may not surface relevant documents due to a lack of search tuning and query boosting. Enter regex.
Regex is the de facto standard for parsing text from large documents. When used in cognitive search, it supports query boosting, improves keyword tuning, and optimizes search relevance. Let me explain with an example.
A document boosted to rank one for "KPI" might not show up at all when its plural sibling "KPIs" is the search query. To boost the doc for both, the admin will have to enter two separate queries manually, unless he knows regex. Instead of entering multiple keywords, he can simply boost the document by entering a regex pattern, i.e., /kpis?/i which will produce the same results for both "KPI" and "KPIs".
Similarly, document X boosted for query "launch" and the pattern "/launch??/i" will boost the document for "launch," "Launch," "LAUNCH," "launches," "LAUNCHES," “Launching,” and several other matching words.
How SearchUnify Leverages Regex Patterns to Augment Search Relevancy
Regex can automate various tedious manual tasks and can be customized to fit your particular use case. But when coupled with SearchUnify's intelligent search, regex can work wonders to amplify keyword boosting, query boosting, and so on.
1. Amp Up Keyword Tuning: SearchUnify admins can use a regex to boost document X for all the forms of character combinations of the query "add checkbox." This means anyone looking for "adding checkbox" or "add checkboxes" will also see document X on top of the results. Additionally, you can enable synonym boost so that if someone uses synonyms like "button bar" or "check box," the experience is still positive.
2. Handling Query Inflexion: With the recent release, SearchUnify admins can cherry-pick the top 10 results for one search term or a whole set of them. This allows the enterprise to boost (subset) documents for a set of query patterns, thus amplifying the success keyword boosting. And oh, you can custom tune based on search clients as well.
3. Testing Your Tuning: It is better to test the waters before jumping right in, right? That's precisely what Test Your Tuning is all about. It enables admins to beta test new tuning in a simulation before implementing it on the search client(s). This ensures it delivers the desired results with no whoopsies for your end-users.
Our Client Improved Deflection Rate from 39% to 50% in Just 3 Months! Want to Know How?
Join Lynette Ledoux, Customer Specialist, SearchUnify, and Cheryl Zupke, Technical Content Developer, Cornerstone InDemand, in a fireside chat to hear the complete story. In the live event, Cheryl will share how the customer success team at SearchUnify worked with her to improve the cumulative case deflection from 39% to 50% in just three months. Register now!
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