Thursday, December 23, 2010

From keywords to objects

Fig. 1. Three meanings of the query "Ben Hur"

In NaverLab Semantic Movie Search, user always initiates search from the keyword interface. This is for the disambiguation of the meaning of the keyword query. If the meaning of the query is ambiguous, in other words there are more than two meanings, all the search results of the possible meanings are displayed. Then user decide which meaning to further explore.

If there remains only one meaning after the disambiguation, it is possible to launch directly the visual data browser. But in NaverLab Semantic Movie Search, the keyword interface (Object Search) is chosen to launch anyway. This is just the problem of policy. We thought this way is more intuitive and usable for users to use.

Let's run the query "Ben Hur". There are three multiple meanings and three movies that have the same title "Ben Hur" are returned. (Fig. 1) Let's see another query that have only one meaning. The search result of "shawshank redemption" is in Fig. 2. Only one movie is returned but other expanded query results (director, leading actors, etc) follow after. This is just for user's convenience.



Fig. 2. In the case of single meaning, the results of the expanded queries are shown together for user's convenience

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