Making Search Work Like Your Brain

NASA Ames’ Perilog software improves search results for data mining applications

Perilog overcomes the shortcomings of traditional search methods by discovering contextual associations between words and phrases.

Innovators at NASA’s Ames Research Center have patented Perilog software, an advanced contextual search method that finds and ranks text documents according to their relevance to particular words or phrases. The software automatically identifies associations based on context within a single document or a set of documents, without the need to maintain any categorization. So users are quickly able to identify related topics, even if those topics do not co-occur in the same document and the user has no prior knowledge of the documents.

Perilog’s benefits include:

• Reliable results: Delivers more relevant search results, with fewer queries by the user
• Contextual relevance: Enables users to discover words, ideas and situational details that are contextually associated with a specific query
• Intelligent search: Allows users to discover key themes in large document sets
• Efficient classification: Eliminates the time and expense associated with maintaining document categorization
  

What makes Perilog stand out among other search engine tools? Perilog determines the contextual association of words and word pairs in documents, overcoming the shortcomings of other tools. Those tools treat all words equally, cannot distinguish words that can mean more than one thing (such as “bark”), and overlook related search terms not entered by the user, delivering only a fraction of the relevant results. Instead, Perilog creates a network model of contextually related words and phrases, and matches the phrase query network with document networks to provide flexible and thorough phrase matching that other methods don’t offer.

Perilog is offering advanced data mining capabilities to help improve the quality of safety data for the Aviation Safety Reporting System and the United States airline industry. It also can be used to improve data mining in many other industries, including knowledge management and document retrieval, life sciences and medical research, intelligence analyses, commercial search engines, and contextual online advertising solutions.

Interested in learning more? Contact Fuentek, LLC at:
(919) 249-0327
arc14512@fuentek.com

–By Karen Hiser