Health Search – Semantic Medline Cognition

Cognition’s Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies add word and phrase meaning and understanding to computer applications. Using a mix of linguistics and mathematical algorithms – Cognition.com has effectively taught the computer the meanings of words, word associations and context. 

It also has knowledge of the relations between words and phrases, especially paraphrase (a “finger” or a “digit”) and taxonomy (a “finger” is part of a “hand”, a “cow” is a “bovine” and is a “mammal”). More detailed analysis of the Cognition NLP search can be found on the website describing semantic derivation of 

• Morphology - The various forms of word, e.g. singular, plural, tense
• Syntax - The grammatical structure, e.g. verbs, nouns
• Semantics - Word and sentence meaning, augmented by synonymy and taxonomy
• Spelling - The various ways words are spelled (or misspelled)

The great explanatory video of Cognition NLP in action is well worth viewing. 

Cognition.com has applied these technologies to health search using Medline abstracts as SemanticMedline.com. This disambiguation with Medline abstracts is very well done and provides additional layers to the search by providing a drop down menu for alternate word or phrase meanings to help refine your search further. The greater accuracy of search is astounding.

As with all the new search technologies it is great to be able to compare directly with our current search strategies and Medline.cognition.com provides a meta-analysis page through Compare.Cognition.Com to demonstrate the advantages of Cognition technology. In fact Cognitions Semantic Map provides software applications with ‘understanding’ of more than four million semantic contexts and 10 million semantic connections.

Personally I find the ability to articulate my cerebrations and cogitations in ‘question form’ – a very satisfying way to engender the most appropriate evidence-based return for my efforts. Much more satisfying than the traditional keyword search engines.