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. Techniques 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. History Techniques for probabilistic weighting of single word terms