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Define a finite set of terms with a dictionary

Define a finite set of terms with a dictionary

Recognize terms and synonyms for terms that are significant to you, such as the names of products that you sell.

Help Discovery find terms that have meaning to your use case by adding a dictionary. You can define multiple synonyms for a term or a set of words in the same category.

You can create a dictionary by adding the terms one by one or by uploading a CSV file that lists the terms.

To add dictionary terms one by one, complete the following steps:

  1. From the Teach domain concepts section of the Improvement tools panel, choose Dictionaries.

  2. Click New.

  3. Name your dictionary.

    For example, Transportation.

  4. Choose the language. A dictionary can contain terms in only one language.

  5. Optional: Expand Advanced options, and edit the facet name for the dictionary.

    Facets are used to categorize documents. A user can choose a facet type to narrow their search results. The dictionary name in lowercase is used as the facet name by default. You might want to change the facet to be uppercase.

  6. Enter a term, and then select the + button to add it.

    For example vehicle and engine.

    In English dictionaries, specify the dictionary terms in lowercase. Only use uppercase if you want Discovery to ignore lowercase mentions of the term when they occur in text. When terms are analyzed to determine whether they are occurrences of the dictionary enrichment, the surface form of the term with uppercase match is used. For example, a vehicle entry in the dictionary results in annotations for vehicle, Vehicle, or VEHICLE mentions when they occur in text. For a Sat entry in the dictionary, annotations are added for Sat or SAT, but not for sat.

    Dictionary matching is case-sensitive for Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Hebrew.

  7. To add synonyms for the term, click the Edit icon, and then enter synonyms in the Other terms field. Separate multiple synonyms with a comma. Click Save term.

    The dictionary can contain terms and their synonyms or a category and terms that belong to the category.

    For the term vehicle, you can specify synonyms such as car, automobile, sedan, convertible, station wagon, and so on. For engine, you can specify gasket, carburetor, piston, and valves.

    Be careful not to add too many synonyms. Test the impact of any synonyms that you add. When you test, use data that is different from the data you use to derive the synonyms.

  8. Continue adding terms.

    Similar terms from all of the collections in the current project are suggested as new entries.

    Suggested terms are taken from a field named text. If the text field is missing, a field with the longest string value and highest number of distinct values is chosen. Suggestions are not displayed if there are no documents or the collection has no fields with text data.

  9. Click Save dictionary.

  10. Choose the collections and fields where you want to apply the dictionary, and then click Apply.

Example

A transportation dictionary is added to a project.

Transportation dictionary in the product ui
Transportation dictionary

The resulting facet that is created for the dictionary is displayed in the search page.

Search page with Transportation facet
Transportation facet

The document where the enrichment is applied contains the following sentence:

Some car fluids can be acidic, such as battery fluid.

The following JSON snippet illustrates how a Transportation dictionary enrichment mention is stored when the term car, which is a synonym for the vehicle dictionary entry, is found in the document. In this collection, the dictionary enrichment is applied to the text field, so the mention is listed in the entities array that is in the enriched_text array.

{
  "enriched_text": [
    {
      "entities": [
        {
          "model_name": "Dictionary:.Transportation",
          "mentions": [
            {
              "confidence": 1,
              "location": {
                "end": 91122,
                "begin": 91119
              },
              "text": "car"
            }
          ],
          "text": "vehicle",
          "type": "Transportation"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Uploading dictionary terms

To add dictionary from a CSV file, complete the following steps:

  1. Create a CSV file that contains the dictionary terms that you want to add.

    Use UTF-8 encoding. Specify one entry per line.

    • To define a set of synonymous terms, use the following syntax:

      <term>,<synonym>,<synonym>,<synonym>,...
      

      For example:

      vehicle,car,automobile,sedan,convertible,station wagon
      

      The entry in this example creates a vehicle dictionary entry. When the dictionary enrichment is applied to a document, any mentions of vehicle, car, automobile, sedan, convertible, or station wagon are tagged as instances of the vehicle dictionary entry.

    • To define a set of terms in the same category, use the following syntax:

      <category>,<related-term>,<related-term>,...
      

      For example:

      engine,gasket,carburetor,piston,valves
      

      The entry in this example creates an engine dictionary entry. When the dictionary enrichment is applied to a document, any mentions of engine,gasket,carburetor,piston, or valves are tagged as instances of the engine dictionary entry.

  2. From the Teach domain concepts section of the Improvement tools panel, choose Dictionaries.

  3. Click Upload.

  4. Name your dictionary and choose the language that was used in the CSV file.

  5. Optional: Expand Advanced options, and specify edit the facet name for the dictionary. Facets are used to categorize documents. A user can choose a facet type to narrow their search. The dictionary name in lowercase is used as the facet name by default. You might want to change the facet to be uppercase.

  6. Click Upload to browse for the CSV file that you created earlier.

  7. Click Create.

  8. Choose the collections and fields where you want to apply the dictionary, and then click Apply.

If you add a dictionary by using the Enrichment API, after you apply the API-generated dictionary enrichment to a field, the dictionary is displayed in the Dictionaries page. However, you cannot edit the API-generated dictionary from the dictionary tool in the product user interface.

To delete a dictionary, you must use the Delete an enrichment method of the Discovery v2 API.

Dictionary enrichments that you add to one project can be applied to collections in other projects in the same service instance. In fact, you can apply them to collections in a Content Mining project from the deployed Content Mining application.

Dictionary limits

The number of dictionaries and term entries you can create per service instance depends on your Discovery plan type.

Dictionary plan limits
Plan Number of dictionaries per service instance Number of term entries per dictionary Number of terms for which suggestions can be generated
Cloud Pak for Data Unlimited Unlimited 1,000
Premium 200 10,000 1,000
Enterprise 200 10,000 1,000
Plus (includes Trial) 20 1,000 50