THE CHALLENGE: PROVIDING INSTANT CONTEXT WORD EXPLANATIONS

Imagine being able to point to an unfamiliar word and getting an instant explanation – in context – about that word.

Nowhere is the challenge of words better expressed than in the hierarchy of Japanese languages. Katakana is a streamlined 48 symbol alphabet allowing Japanese expressions to be put into western typography. The real issue is that the traditional Japanese alphabet Kanji has a unique character for every word: a newspaper requires knowledge of 2000 words, a university education, 5000 words, and a scholar understands over 10,000 words.

The problem is that few of us know 10,000 words – yet we deal with documents all the time that contain new or unfamiliar terminology. Most of us gloss across the terms, hoping we find their meaning in the context of what’s being written – it’s a haphazard approach.

THE SOLUTION: CONTENT ANALYST

Because Content Analyst reads everything it is fed based on the concepts represented, it always has a list of related and associated terminology for each term in the document. This is part of how it thinks. Instant Context is just that: instant, and always available. Better still, instant context is presented in terms of what Content Analyst knows based on this and related documents, so that an unfamiliar term is correlated with familiar and relevant terminology.

Solutions in Action:
Making sense of mumbo-jumbo
Medical Reviewers of patient data have a real challenge: the information they are sorting through is very technical, and the terms are written for physicians and scholars. Case workers and other individuals who need to assemble information from patient data have a real challenge – it’s like going back to the Stone Age, with computerized text on the screen and a hardcopy medical dictionary next to the keyboard.

Life before Content Analyst
Reviewing records had two seemingly insurmountable issues. The first was the time it took to review a file – complicated by having to research terminology. The second was the training time involved to bring any worker up to a reasonable knowledge level – as well as learning to juggle print vs. electronic copy.

Implementing Content Analyst
Basically, there’s nothing special about implementing Content Analyst here. Every time Content Analyst creates an index, it also creates the associations between every term in the documents it is indexing. “Instant context” is simply a by-product of our human-like conceptual search.

Life after Content Analyst
Those medical reference texts are consigned to the bookshelves, gathering dust. Whenever a researcher has a question about a word or phrase, he or she merely highlights that information and right-clicks their mouse. An instant window pops up with a list of related query words, in order of relevance. Instant answers, no need to research printed dictionaries or handbooks.