Using natural queries

The Natural parser supports searching for similar documents, a search method sometimes referred to as similarity searching. The Natural parser supports searching the full text of documents only. The Natural parser does not support searching collection fields and zones. The Natural parser does not support Verity query language except for topics.

Note: The Verity products and documentation refer to the Natural parser as the Query-By-Example parser, as well as the Free Text parser.

Meaningful words are automatically treated as if they are preceded by the MANY modifier and the STEM operator. By implicitly applying the STEM operator, the search engine searches not only for the meaningful words themselves, but also for words that have the same stem. By implicitly applying the MANY modifier, Verity calculates each document’s score based on the word density it finds for meaningful words; the denser the occurrences of a word in a document, the higher the document’s score.

By default, common words (such as the, has, and for) are stripped away, and the query is built based on the more significant words (such as personnel, interns, schools, and mentors). Therefore, the results of a natural language search are likely to be less precise than a search performed using the simple or explicit parser.

The Natural parser interprets topic names as topic objects. This means that if the specified text block contains a topic name, the query expression represented by the topic is considered in the search.