Keywords vs Name Searches

Mark McKenzie_1

I'm still trying to come to grips with the relatively new 'Name… Place… Year…' search options.

I have pretty much from day one limited my Full Text searches to the use of Keywords, but I'm willing to learn 'new' ways to go about things and maybe get some better results.

Can someone explain the 'behind the scenes' operations that may explain these two different search results?

Keywords are pretty straight forward in that you get what you ask for, but what 'Name' search is doing is a bit of a mystery

Robert Raymond

Mark,

You probably know that A.I. is used to create the transcriptions. Another step, "named entity recognizer," does natural language processing to identify the language entities present in the transcription: names, dates, and places. The keywords field searches the transcriptions. The name field searches the entities identified as names. Your first search failed to find the result returned by the second search because the recognizer did not recognize Sylvester Thompson as a name.

To see the entities recognized in a result, turn on Fact View. The switch is above the first result. In the result returned by your second search, one can see that Pearline Joyner was recognized as a name and Sylvester Thompson was not. Consequently, if you do a search for Keywords=["sylvester thompson"] and Name=["pearline joyner"] (don't enter the brackets) you will receive the same result as in your second search.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/full-text/results?count=20&q.fullName=%22pearline%20joyner%22&q.text=%22sylvester%20thompson%22

This raises the question, why use the name field ever? One reason is that the entity recognizer often recognizes names appearing in reverse order—surname first. A keyword search will not match those, but a name search will.

Further, it gives you the opportunity to mix AND with OR in your search. "I want this name, AND, any one of this list of five optional keywords."

Bottom line, you have two tools, both of which can be utilized to find your family.

Mark McKenzie_1

@Robert Raymond Ah… Yes… the old 'named entity recognizer'!!! I suspected it might be a 'wet ware subroutine' [i.e. volunteer indexer]

Much appreciate your help in understanding the Name search option. It helps explain a few things I've observed

I had seen it produce results for 'reverse order' names which as you say, Keyword searches will not [seems like it use to though]

Does a Place search make use of something similar or does it simply apply 'normal' filter[s] before presenting the results?

Thanks Again for the helpful info…

Robert Raymond

Good observation. The natural language recognizer identifies places too. However, in addition to those places, the place field also searches the catalog information for the image group. This behavior is causing some user confusion, as images appear in the results that don't match a specified place. It is possible this behavior might be adjusted in the future.

Regarding names, I would not be a good employee if I didn't mention that FamilySearch invites everyone to give back or pay it forward using the "Get Involved" feature. Users review the names identified by the computer and make corrections. It is fast and fun. Try it at https://www.familysearch.org/en/getinvolved/opportunities or use the Get Involved smartphone app.