OrcaSearch

OrcaTec offers a complete suite of textual analytics tools including concept search, visual clustering and predictive coding as part of the OrcaTec Document Decisioning Suite™.  The suite provides legal professionals with an all-in-one  offering for the analysis and review phases of the electronic discovery process and includes OrcaPredict for predictive coding, early case assessment and first past review, OrcaSearch for concept searching, OrcaCluster for visual clustering and OrcaReview for second pass document review.

OrcaSearch

OrcaTec has more than 25 different ways to search your data set, including Concept Search built by the man who fathered it.

• Patent-pending, visual Concept Search (sometimes called conceptual searching) shows you documents with the same context in this document set – documents you didn’t even know to look for.
• Search Suggestions assist you in distinguishing special spellings, or unfamiliar words or names, substantially improving the “findability” of documents.
• Spelling Variations is useful for identifying similarly spelled words or words that are commonly misspelled.
• Advanced Search Queries allows for drag and drop, automatically writing a detailed query for you. It eliminates the guessing of how to get to information and makes anyone an advanced query writer.
• The Interesting Phrases feature provides a summary list of distinctive words and phrases particular to the individual document or group of documents that can be used as part of a topic search, and suggests further search terms that can be used to negotiate with during the Meet and Confer, thereby optimizing workflow.

What is Concept Search?

When you search with a Concept Search engine, like the one in OrcaSearch, it does not just look for those words that literally match your query.  It looks for the whole idea – the entire possible topic for which you are looking – within the context of the collection of documents in which you are running the search.

What makes OrcaTec’s Concept Search so special is that it is search with the understanding of the concept you’re looking for, not merely search for a word.  For eDiscovery document review, early case assessment or GRC (governance, risk management and compliance), topic-based searching with Concept Search is a must-have tool.

How does Concept Search Work?

True Concept Search, like that in OrcaSearch, works by understanding the meaning of the words in context. For example, the system sees that the word “car” has other words associated with it, like “road,” “highway” and “wheel.” It sees that “truck,” vehicle” and “Chevy” have those same words associated with them.  Thus, when you search for “car,” it will modify the query to include a search for “road,” “highway” and “wheel,” thereby also finding “truck,” vehicle” and “Chevy.”

The basic idea is that the meaning of a word is how it is used in the language.  If you read some text, like “blah, blah, blah, court, blah, blah, basketball, etc.,” you will understand “court” to mean one thing.  On the other hand, a text like “blah, blah, blah, court, blah, blah,judge, etc.,” will lead you to understand “court” to mean something different.

The result of using Concept Search (also called conceptual search or topic search) is that the documents at the top of the list are those that not only contain the original term or terms for which you searched, but also contain the maximum amount of context about that particular term.  These documents represent the best the collection has to offer in terms of being about the topic, as the topic is understood in the context of the document collection.

A good example is “Rawhide” in the Enron emails. “Rawhide” could mean a kind of leather or an old TV show, but in the context of the Enron emails, “Rawhide” actually refers to one of its off-books partnerships.  “Raptor” was another of those problematic partnerships.  So a Concept Search query in the Enron emails for “Raptor” would not net you documents about hawks, but rather about “Rawhide” and other off-books partnerships, even if the words “Raptor” and “Rawhide” did not actually appear in any particular document itself.

For users, the benefits of Concept Search are:

• Increased likelihood of finding a larger number of relevant documents.
• Less time spent perusing irrelevant documents.
• Less time spent trying to come up with the right keywords.
• Reduced time, cost and effort overall in retrieving  the best documents in reply to the concept of your query in the context of the entire document collection.

The OrcaTec Search System

Our system offers both Concept Search and Concept Clustering.  Both are based on our patent-pending Concept Search technology.  OrcaTec learns the meanings of words in the same that people do — from the words that accompany each word.  For example, if you hear the word “court” in isolation, you may not know what that word means.  But if you hear the word “court” in the same sentence with the word “basketball,” or the word “judge,” now you know what “court” means.

The OrcaTec system creates language models from the documents that capture the meaning patterns among words.  When you do a Concept Search, the system takes the word or words that you entered and passes them through the language model to include additional words in the query.  The result is that the documents at the top of the search result list are most about the topic that you searched for while the documents further down the list are about the topic, even if they do not contain any of the words that you originally searched for.  Concept Search groups together documents that are more or less about the same topic.

We apply the same language modeling to Concept Clustering.  These concepts are created before any searching is done. The language model is used to identify clusters or groups of similar documents.

Search system features include:

About OrcaTec

OrcaTec helps clients address and manage business and legal challenges associated with the discovery and management of unstructured data with advanced analytics and predictive coding technologies delivered in the form of products and services to law firms, corporations and governments. OrcaTec offers a complete suite of textual analytics tools including concept search, visual clustering and predictive coding as part of the OrcaTec Document Decisioning Suite(TM).  The suite provides legal professionals with an all-in-one  offering for the analysis and review phases of the electronic discovery process and includes OrcaPredict for predictive coding, early case assessment and first past review, OrcaSearch for concept searching, OrcaCluster for visual clustering and OrcaReview for second pass document review.

To learn more about OrcaTec and the OrcaTec Document Decisioning Suite, visit OrcaTec.com.