Semantic search denotes search with meaning, as distinguished from lexical search where the search engine looks for literal matches of the query words or variants of them, without understanding the overall meaning of the query. Semantic search seeks to improve

search Searching may refer to: Music * "Searchin', Searchin", a 1957 song originally performed by The Coasters * Searching (China Black song), "Searching" (China Black song), a 1991 song by China Black * Searchin' (CeCe Peniston song), "Searchin" (C ...

accuracy by understanding the searcher's intent and the

context In semiotics, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, context refers to those objects or entities which surround a ''focal event'', in these disciplines typically a communicative event, of some kind. Context is "a frame that surrounds the event ...

ual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the

Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. Some authors regard semantic search as a set of techniques for retrieving knowledge from richly structured data sources like

ontologies In information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definitions of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, or entities that pertain to one, many, or all domains of discourse. More ...

and

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

as found on the

Semantic Web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

. Such technologies enable the formal articulation of

domain knowledge Domain knowledge is knowledge of a specific discipline or field in contrast to general (or domain-independent) knowledge. The term is often used in reference to a more general discipline—for example, in describing a software engineer who has ge ...

at a high level of expressiveness and could enable the user to specify their intent in more detail at query time. The articulation enhances content relevance and depth by including specific places, people, or concepts relevant to the query.

Knowledge Graphs

Tools like Google’s Knowledge Graph provide structured relationships between entities to enrich query interpretation.Singhal, A. (2012). Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings. Google Blog. https://blog.google/products/search/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not/

Vector Representations (Embeddings)

Models like BERT or Sentence-BERT convert words or sentences into dense vectors for similarity comparison.Reimers, N., & Gurevych, I. (2019). Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks. ''EMNLP 2019''. https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084

Ontology-Based Search

Semantic ontologies like OWL, RDF, and Schema.org organize concepts and relationships, allowing systems to infer related terms and deeper meanings.Bodenreider, O. (2004). The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS): integrating biomedical terminology. ''Nucleic Acids Research'', 32(suppl_1), D267–D270.

Hybrid Search Models

Combines lexical retrieval (e.g., BM25) with semantic ranking using pretrained transformer models for optimal performance.Lin, J., et al. (2021). Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking: BERT and Beyond. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06467

Applications

* Web Search: Google and Bing integrate semantic models into their ranking algorithms. * E-commerce: Intent-based product searches improve conversion and discovery.Amazon Science. (2021). Using neural retrieval for semantic product search. https://www.amazon.science/blog/using-neural-retrieval-for-semantic-product-search * Enterprise Search: Corporate systems use it for document retrieval, customer support, and knowledge management.IBM. (2020). Using AI and machine learning for smarter enterprise search. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/11/ai-enterprise-search/ * Healthcare and Legal Research: Facilitates retrieval of case law, research articles, and clinical data.Wang, Q., et al. (2020). COVID-19 literature retrieval with semantic search. ''Nature'', 582, 560–561.Chalkidis, I., et al. (2020). LEGAL-BERT. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02559

Challenges

* Ambiguity and Polysemy (e.g., "jaguar" as an animal or a car brand) * Bias in Training DataBender, E. M., et al. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. ''FAccT 2021''. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 * Computational Costs of deep semantic modelsSchwartz, R., et al. (2019). Green AI. ''Communications of the ACM'', 63(12), 54–63. * Multilingual PerformancePires, T., Schlinger, E., & Garrette, D. (2019). How multilingual is Multilingual BERT? https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01502

Future Directions

* Conversational Search and voice interfaces * Multimodal Search: Incorporating video, image, and text togetherRadford, A., et al. (2021). CLIP: Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision. https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00020 * Explainability and ethical transparency in semantic systems

References

External links

Semantic Search 2008 Workshop at ESWC'08

Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval at ECIR'08

Semantic Search 2008 Workshop at ESWC

Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in IR at ECIR 2008
Internet search engines Semantic Web Information retrieval genres {{internet-stub de:Semantische Suche