Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery User Guide

Features of Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery

Agents

The use of Agents automates the searching process, making life easier for the ordinary user.

An agent is an intelligent query which you can use to check for interesting new items when they arrive in the system; it learns from you over a period of time. A unique ability of agents is that they can display full details of the query, allowing concepts to be added or removed interactively.

You can run an agent to find new items which have arrived since it was last checked, and you can ask it to send an e-mail message (an alert) to a specified e-mail address whenever new items arrive. Agents are particularly useful when you regularly search for the same information (for example, about a specific company).

Agents come in two types:

personal agents (designed for use specifically by a particular user)
group agents (designed for use by anybody who has access to them)

Note: This feature is not available in the Dialog Discovery version.

E-mail alerting

E-mail alerting for new items of interest is available in Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery, allowing you to link directly from the e-mail notification to the relevant documents.

Note: This feature is not available in the Dialog Discovery version.

Foreign language support

Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery contains support for various foreign languages. It has automatic language detection, and foreign language word stemming. Word stemming is where all cases and forms of a word are reduced to a single root form. This means that plurals of words and different cases of regular verbs are all treated like the root word.

Top Terms

This is a method of refining a search even further, by the presentation of significantly related words for use in a secondary search. After an initial search, Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery finds several words that it considers to be relevant to your query. You can choose any of these words to use in the next search. If you select documents in the results list, the effectiveness of Top Terms can be increased.

Thesaurus

A powerful thesaurus feature is available with Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery, making it possible to select alternative words with a similar meaning.

Result sorting

The results of a search can be displayed in various different orders.

Duplicate removal

Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery removes duplicate document items. Each item in the list of results is displayed as normal, except that items with duplicates have links to all duplicate URLs displayed, along with the other caption information. You can click on any of the URLs to read the document.

Record formats

Support for different file types of documents has been provided. Multiple document types/formats from separate sources can be included in a single index structure, and displayed without substantially changing the original document structure and layout.

Filter selection

Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery can restrict a search so that only documents above a specified threshold of relevance will be returned and displayed (for example, restrict the searches only to those documents scoring 80% or more). Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery can also restrict a search so that it returns only those documents which satisfy date requirements.

Improve

This is a method of refining a search, by selecting specific words from the first search for inclusion in a secondary search.

Phrase searching

This is a method of defining a grouping of search terms called a ‘phrase’, which has a higher weight than individual search terms.

Fuzzy searching

This is a method of entering a query where the exact spelling is not known. Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery uses fuzzy logic methods to find words which are a close match.

Wildcard searching

This is a method of reducing the amount of typing that is required to enter search terms. It permits the use of a wildcard character which means that a shortened (right-truncated) version of a word can be entered instead of a complete word.

Dynamic categorization (clustering)

This is a method of collecting together document items into groupings called clusters, and identifying them visually by means of cluster icons. This makes it easier for you to look for similar documents when paging through the results screens. Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery can also display a results screen that shows only documents belonging to the same cluster type.

Search term translation

This is a method of entering queries in one language, and having them translated to a foreign language during the search, which returns foreign-language documents containing the translated terms.

German word splitting

The automatic language detection with Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery will apply word splitting to German words, where the entire document is in German.

Word highlighting

When a Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery search returns PDF and HTML documents, the words that have been included in the query will be highlighted in the documents when they are opened. This applies to documents on both local and remote storage.

Protected log in and log out

Dialog Alert/Dialog Discovery has a password-protected log in and log out procedure to prevent unauthorized access.

Note: This feature is not available in the Dialog Discovery version.

Help

You can get context-sensitive help in most parts of the system at any time, by clicking on the Help button, found at the top of each screen (example below):