chapter seven
7 Interpreting query intent through semantic search
This chapter covers
- The mechanics of query interpretation
- Implementing an end-to-end query intent pipeline to parse, enrich, transform, and search
- Tagging and classifying query terms and phrases
- Augmenting queries using knowledge graph traversals
- Interpreting the semantics of domain-specific query patterns
In chapters 5 and 6, we used content and signals to interpret the domain-specific meaning of incoming user queries. We discussed phrase identification, misspelling detection, synonym discovery, query intent classification, related-terms expansion, and even query-sense disambiguation. We mostly discussed these techniques in isolation to demonstrate how they each work independently.
In this chapter, we’ll put all those techniques into practice, integrating them into a unified query interpretation framework. We’ll show an example search interface that accepts real queries, interprets them, rewrites them to better express the end user’s intent, and then returns ranked results.