As a follow up to my posting about SDD systems yesterday, I wanted to uncover some more material on the subject.
It occurred to me to search a well known computer science publisher’s site using just the acronym, “SDD.”
Here are the results from the first ten (10) hits (in no particular order):
- semi-discrete matrix decomposition (SDD) method
- soft decision-directed (SDD) adaptation
- self-organizing link layer protocol (SDD)
- Hierarchical Set Decision Diagrams (SDD)
- SDD (strictly diagonally dominant)
- secure Directed Diffusion protocol (SDD)
- structured dialogic design
- strong disjunctive database
- solid-state-storage-device
- storytest-driven development
Don’t bother counting, its ten (10) out of ten (10).
A better search engine would have computed a dissimilarity for terms and used that to separate terms that are likely to not have the same meaning. It should then group those “dissimilar” terms and say to the user: Your term(s) may have more than one meaning. We have created probable meanings for you to use as filters. (The display the snippets similar to those above to the user.)
That would avoid my having to sort through 236 “hits” as of today for “SDD.”
True, that is a very poor search term but if we can boost performance for the edge cases, think of what we will do for the more main stream searches.
Oh, sorry, almost forgot the contest part! Please contribute other expansions for the acronym SDD. (non-obscene expansions) No prizes, I am just curious about the number of unique expansions. Does make a good example of semantic ambiguity.
On a more serious note, a search interface that enabled readers to choose from a listing of terms the disambiguation of such content, would over time improve its search offerings to users. One can imagine professors having their graduate students disambiguating their articles for the same reason people write HTML pages. They want their content found by others.