Concept Search

Evident Discovery’s Conceptual Search is done using mathematical Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This method indexes the entire population of documents, learning conceptually how they relate to each other. It then searches groups of documents based on meaning or concepts that describe the same subject matter. The Evident Conceptual Search engine was developed by Bell Laboratories for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Department of Defense, and other Government Departments. It is a proven, defensible, and repeatable search method that is used to cull down documents in cases of all sizes.

With keyword search, the results are only as good as the information the reviewer puts in. A good reviewer can overcome some of the limits of keyword search – such as finding “stems” and word derivatives (plurals, different keyword forms, etc.), but they can’t overcome the fact that keyword searching is essentially “dumb.”

Concept search, on the other hand, deals with the subject matter for which you’re searching. For the legal reviewer, the power of concept search - as another option in their arsenal of Evident tools - is considerable. A reviewer can enter a sentence or phrase, and quickly find all documents that are conceptually-related to that query, along with a score of just how “relevant” each document is. Even more useful, a reviewer can take a highly relevant document and with the click of a mouse, turn it into a search query. Evident will find all of the other documents that relate to the same topics or concepts. There’s simply no way to do this with keyword search alone. With Evident, you get the answers you’re looking for, instantly.