Answers: Antonyms, Acronyms and N-gram

Search Best Practices - Search Configuration
1

Hi Yext Community,

How does Answers manage Synonyms, Antonyms, Acronyms and N-gram? The synonym aspect is well documented in the Hitchhiker content but I’m unsure on how Yext manages the others.

Many thanks, Sam

1 Like
2

Hey Sam,

Here are some quick answers on these topics.

Synonyms
Yext Answers supports both one-way and two-way synonyms. With Semantic Text Search synonyms are often not necessary since this algorithm uses semantic embeddings rather than text search. That said, synonyms can be used with any algorithms to improve recall.

Antonyms
Yext Answers does not have any special handling of antonyms. Since antonyms are the opposite of words searching for generally you would not want to match on antonyms. If you want a search result to appear that contains an antonym, you can use the synonyms system to do that.

Acronyms
Yext Answers does not have any default handlings of acronyms. If the acronym is super common, Semantic Text Search might handle it automatically. Otherwise a one-way or a two-way synonyms I the best way to handle acronyms.

N-Gram
For the Text Search algorithm, Yext Answers will automatically include some level of typo tolerance / fuzzy matching. This is not configurable but will happen automatically to improve results. Yext Answers also includes spellchecking to handle common misspelling or typos. For Semantic Text Search, n-gram searching isn’t very relevant since it’s search based on meaning, not the underlying characters.

Let me know if this helps.

Max

3 Likes
3

Thanks Max, really appreciate your response here. Thanks, Sam