AI Search’s Synonym feature is extremely powerful but requires a careful eye and an awareness of the content before configuring. The first thing to note is that AI Search’s Synonyms act identically to the dictionary definition. Unless the two terms can be substituted for each other in a sentence, they should not be used.
The recommendation is to be reactive instead of proactive in most cases. While it could be helpful to add a few entries to get started, the administrator should review the ‘Queries with no results’ to get a better understanding of the audience's search patterns. The configuration is done on a per profile basis and the administrator can associate more than one Synonym dictionary to a given Search Profile.
Key Considerations for Synonym Functionality:
- Synonym terms and their payload carry equal weight for relevancy
- Synonym terms and their payload are bidirectional
- The synonym term: 'cat' with payload '["animal"]’ will cause queries with cat to expand to animal and queries with animal to expand to cat.
- Matches occur on both term and payload.
- Meaning if you have the following configured: term: benefit; payload: [“401k”, “ESPP”] and an additional term: ESPP; payload: [“Employee Stock Purchase Plan”, “stock”]
A search for: ESPP will match on ESPP, benefit, employee stock purchase plan, and stock which could lead to a noisy search experience.
General Synonym Guidelines:
Do:
1. Use the dictionary form of the word. For nouns, use the singular form. For verbs, the infinitive.
2. Include brand names and proprietary software/hardware if such terms would be universally applicable to the searches
3. Include units and their abbreviations that are relevant to the IT domain.
Example:
gigabits per second ↔ Gbps
4. Flag 2-letter acronyms and other short acronyms/terms ambiguous in meaning for review.
Examples:
AA ↔ anti-aliasing
dB ↔ database
DO NOT:
1. DO NOT include terms pairs where one is a subcategory of the other.
Example:
Chromebook ↔ laptop
2. DO NOT include terms that share the same parent class but are not strictly synonymous:
Example:
Microsoft Windows 10 ↔ Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
3. DO NOT include quantities + unit pairs for arbitrary quantities.
Examples:
10 gigabits ↔ ten gigabits
2 sides ↔ two sides
However, if the quantity is part of a finite set pertinent to the domain, as in the case of standards, it may be included.
Examples:
- 5G ↔ fifth generation
- BT4.0 ↔ Bluetooth 4.0
4. DO NOT include misspellings of words that are not valid synonyms.
Example:
accessory ↔ accessary (not synonymous)
However, valid spelling variants may be included.
5. DO NOT include definitions or descriptions of terms. These are likely to contribute noise to search results.
Examples:
client ↔ computer connected to a server
firewall ↔ designed to block or prevent attacks
enterprise-grade ↔ self-assessing your application for enterprise adoption
6. DO NOT include related words or phrases that are not strictly synonyms:
Examples:
authorization ↔ proxy
blueprint ↔ schema
capability ↔ predisposition
conferencing ↔ talk
cyber ↔ mechanized
dynamic ↔ functional
files ↔ file management app
automated ↔ real-time
The team hopes this helps. Please feel free to ask questions about synonyms here.
