Synonyms and Regions Taxonomy

2012-07-05 Thread Stephen Lacy
When a user types in South America they want to be able to see documents
containing Brazil, Chile etc.
No I have already thrown together a list of countries and continents
however I'm a little more ambitious,
I would like to get a lot more regions such as american states as well or
Former members of the USSR...
Are there ready made synonym files or taxonomies in a different format.
Are synonyms the best way of achieving this? Perhaps there is a better way?
Any pitfalls or advice on this subject from someone who has done this
before would be appreciated.
Thanks

Stephen


Re: Synonyms and Regions Taxonomy

2012-07-05 Thread Tri Cao
I don't think there's a synonym file for this use case. I am not even sure if
synonym is the right way to handle it.

I think the better way to improve recall is to mark up your documents with
a hidden field of is the geographic relations. For example, before indexing,
you can add a field to all documents containing South America, something
like: South America is a subcontinent, that is consisted of the countries 
Brazil,
Chile, Argentina, …

This data can come from various sources, such as wikipedia, wordnet, etc.


On Jul 5, 2012, at 4:12 AM, Stephen Lacy wrote:

 When a user types in South America they want to be able to see documents
 containing Brazil, Chile etc.
 No I have already thrown together a list of countries and continents
 however I'm a little more ambitious,
 I would like to get a lot more regions such as american states as well or
 Former members of the USSR...
 Are there ready made synonym files or taxonomies in a different format.
 Are synonyms the best way of achieving this? Perhaps there is a better way?
 Any pitfalls or advice on this subject from someone who has done this
 before would be appreciated.
 Thanks
 
 Stephen