How would you search for "John's phone number" in your email? Would you first look for all the email from John and then hope that he had a signature block? (I would.) If not, how could you find his phone number?
IBM's researchers just released a new tool for Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes that allows you to type "John's phone number" as a query. The system is designed to return the answer. That's because the system is smart enough to make the association that the person is looking for John's number, and not just any phone number in an e-mail with the word John in it.
You can download the software, called IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search, for free today from the IBM alphaWorks site.
IBM "researchers built an index of keywords found in corporate e-mail, and then built another index of associated concepts and relationships, Shiv Vaithyanathan, manager of unstructured information mining at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., told InformationWeek. When a query is submitted, the system first matches the words with those in the keyword index, and delivers results based on the associations. Researchers have added rules to help the system determine what information is most likely being sought," reported InformationWeek.
IBM's web site says:
How does it work?
Users simply type keywords to express their queries. The tool intelligently matches these queries against pre-defined concepts (such as persons, phone numbers, addresses, or schedules) and relationships amongst such concepts (such as a person's phone number or address). In ambiguous situations, the intelligent search engine will interact with the user in order to determine the user's true intention.
Users can create new concepts using the tagger utility and thereby customize their semantic search. Both system tags and user-defined tags are searched during run time.
The tagger utility also enables users to easily share taggers, thereby promoting community search efficiency and cooperation while keeping their e-mail private.
The components of IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search are as follows:
- an e-mail crawler (Lotus Notes/Outlook)
- a document-processing, concept-tagging pipeline
- an indexing component
- a run-time semantic search component
- a tagger utility.
Symantec search is not effective in areas where the possible concepts are fairly broad. "Vaithyanathan acknowledged that semantic search becomes less effective as the universe of possible concepts and relationships associated with words grows, which is why it would be difficult to implement, for example, in a huge, general purpose Web mail system," InformationWeek reported. Therefore, it is not seen as a competitor to InBoxer's advanced language technology for electronic discovery.
I copied the sample search page from the application so that you can see what it is all about:
| IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search incorporates the power of advanced search directly into the keyword search. See below for examples of what OmniFind Personal Email Search can accomplish today. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Using from and to along with month and year it is easy to find emails by sender and /or recepient: | Finding someone's address, phone number, and email address is easy: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| To find attachments use attachment or the file extension: | Concepts can be combined with keywords to enable powerful queries such as: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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