operatorsibm-watsonscoringwatson-discovery

How does score multiplier operator in Watson Discovery service work?

I have a set of JSON documents uploaded to my WDS instance. I want to understand the importance of the score multiplier operator(^). The document just says,"Increases the score value of the search term". I have tried a simple query on one field, it multiplies the score by the number specified.

If I specify two fields & I want Watson Discovery to know which of the two fields is more important for the search, is score multiplier applicable in this case? With two fields & a score multiplier applied to one, I could not identify the difference. Also, on what datatypes is this allowed? It didn't work with a number.

Solution

  • I found this through some more experiments. Score multiplier is used when you want to increase the relative importance of fields in the query. So, for example, you want to give more importance to Name.LastName in the below example:

    Name.FirstName:"ABC",Name.LastName:"DEF"^3

    Here, LastName is given more relevance & the search results are ordered in the same way.

    Could be useful for someone.