What Are *Cognitive* Recommendations in Search?

When you think search, you usually think of asking a question and getting an answer. This is usually correct, but sometimes you need more than that.

Consider search in a more specific context:

• Finding the expert in a large company with many locations and remote workers,
• Gathering information on a prospective customer from across multiple sources,
• For a pharmaceutical company, you may need to research drugs with similar chemical structures.

You need a search engine that supports your exploration process, whatever that happens to be. You need a search engine that knows your data, can recommend results, and can help you find what you’re looking for.

Attivio’s cognitive recommendation capability does exactly that.

Getting Cognitive

The Attivio cognitive recommendation capability provides you a more complete picture of your question and smarter search results. It supports your exploratory search by ensuring you have all the information you need to make the right decision.

This capability is “languageless.” No matter what language your data includes and what language is used to query the index, you get ALL the relevant information.

For Example: Expert Locator

One of the most popular use cases we see for our cognitive recommendations capability is the Expert Locator.

How many times have you tried to find someone in your organization that is an expert on a specific topic and couldn’t find the right person? Attivio can easily solve this problem!

Let’s say you’re trying to find an expert on machine learning in your company. But just knowing about machine learning might not be the only criteria you’re looking for. You might also want to look at where the person is located (maybe you want to find someone located in the same office as you), what other topics they know (in our example, also knowing natural language processing might give them extra points) and who they have worked with in the past (so you can get references).

The only problem is you might not know upfront exactly what you’re looking for beyond someone who “understands machine learning,” and you may struggle to formulate a single question that will give you the answer you need.

This is where Attivio can help. Our search engine can recommend other similar experts in your organization that have the same expertise but are located in a different office that might be more appealing for you, or have worked with someone that sits right next to you, so you can ask them about their experience with this person.

You can choose the broad set of attributes that will be taken into consideration when choosing an expert. We will do the rest to help you navigate through the data, understand what’s important to you and make sure you choose the right expert.

Basically, we are creating a knowledge graph of the areas of expertise in your organization to give you all the information you need to choose the right expert for the subject in question.

When using our search engine, we are doing much more than just matching keywords and returning documents. Our entity extraction capability along with our capability to JOIN structured and unstructured data creates a complete knowledge mapping of your organization’s employees.  Once we map the knowledge, we add our cognitive recommendation capability to help you find experts you couldn’t have discovered otherwise to support your research.

You can sign up for a hosted trial to see this capability in action!