How is Semantic search working in understanding the query passed?

Question

I have an index of products treating medical problems. It has FullName, Description, Tags as the main fields. I have been having trouble understanding on what extent does the semantic search understands the query.

For example:
I have a document in which the description is - "This Product treats and depression, addiction...."

I have applied the appropriate semantic configuration taking in description as content fields, Title as FullName and Keywords as Tags.

Now when I enter the query: "Product that can treat excessive drinking and depression" The results which includes Depression in the Tags and bio are found from Full Text Search and then re-ranked in an order which has "Addiction" in the bio. Which makes sense as semantic search is understanding that excessive drinking-> addiction.

But when I just type "excessive depression" in the query. There are no results since the exact word excessive depression is not present in any of the products.

So how do configure the search service so that it also understands the query like mentioned above and returns results for "excessive depression" as the ones which includes "Addiction" as well. I understand that LUIS/ CLU also might help but not really sure where it fits in our search service.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi @SAMANVITH M S Thanks for your patience! It's hard to debug exactly why the Semantic results are not returning as expected. Things like tokenization, document size, Semantic configuration, pre and post processing are all things that may play a role into the Semantic ranking. Please read and follow the best practices in this document: Semantic ranking - Azure Cognitive Search | Microsoft Learn Best, Grace