Math based NLP answers queries

Search Best Practices - Search Configuration
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Hypothetically, let’s say that I wanted to create a Custom Entity Type that models a city or neighborhood. Attributes of the entity would include things like

  • median monthly rent or
  • average cost of a single family home or
  • price per square foot for a home or condo

Is it possible to setup an NLP filter in my config to provide answers to questions like “where can i buy a single family home for less than $500k?”

My understanding is that the answer is no, but I figured I’d ask the question here for the community. in case anyone has any thoughts for this kind of use case. That said, I understand that I could create “buckets” for the entities in by way of multi-option select fields and apply facet filters on the front-end.

1 Like
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Hey Lenny,

Your current understanding is correct. These types of queries are something we are looking at from a product roadmap perspective.

I think there are two key features here:

1. Detecting Dynamic Number Ranges

  • Phones less than $504
  • Homes less than 25,058 sq ft
  • Sandwiches less than 212 calories

2. Only the Fly Calculations
This feature would allow Answers to do on the fly calculations. This would include functions such as AVG, SUM, MEDIAN, MIN, MAX etc.

This would help Answers handles searches like:

  • What is the average price for phones less than 250gb
  • What is the median home price in new york city

Let me know if that makes sense. In the meantime, the workarounds you mentioned are a great path forward.

Max

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Hi Max,

Any updates on the product roadmap for ‘Detecting Dynamic Number Ranges’ or ‘On the Fly Calculations’?

Thanks.

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Hey Lenny,

Detecting Dynamic Number Rangers is higher up on the product roadmap and hoping to get something out in the second half of this year.

On the Fly Calculations is also an interesting area but don’t have any updates there.

Do you have any additional specific use cases in mind?

Thanks!
Max

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Hi Max,

Thank you for the reply. The use case is for a business news and information website. The site would like to store the full text of articles along with metadata such as date published. To this end, they would like the ability to search for articles that are “recent” or “published in the last X days/weeks/months”.

Thanks.