Improve Business Research Using LexisNexis® SmartIndexing Technology™

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data are hot topics in business discourse today as companies are racing to get information faster and more efficiently to stay ahead of their competitors. As such, everyone wants to be a part of this revolution. 

More than a decade ago, LexisNexis® recognized that filtering through massive amounts of news and company information was a time-killer for information professionals—and LexisNexis® SmartIndexing Technology™  was created, so we've always been ahead of the curve.

In this article, we'll share how our SmartIndexing Technology was developed to make research as easy as possible and how you can use it to find exactly what you need in record time.

What is LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology? 

This rules-based classification system takes advantage of artificial intelligence to analyze and tag documents for relevant subjects, industries, companies, organizations, people, and places. Over the years, we’ve built out the world’s most exhaustive taxonomy for news. In addition, the articles used to train the machine learning algorithms are selected by native language speakers and subject matter experts, ensuring greater relevance whether you’re conducting research in English or one of the other eight languages used by LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology. How does it help? SmartIndexing helps you conduct more precise searches based on:

• Subjects and Industries: Documents are analyzed and tagged with more than 7000 unique subjects and industries—seven times the number of subject tags used by the competition.
• Companies: More than 350 K companies—including companies from 50 worldwide stock exchanges, large private companies, other “newsworthy” organizations, and major subsidiaries of any of the above—are tagged with names, locations, tickers, stock exchanges, and key industry data, such as SIC and NAICS Codes.
• People and Places: Key newsworthy people mentioned are tagged and locations are mapped
• Relevancy Scores: Added relevancy scores help de-clutter search results by retrieving only documents that meet or exceed a standard for relevance on the term used for the search. For example, you can narrow results to only those documents with an 85% relevancy score.

This yields richer data, which in turn helps business professionals accelerate research. Instead of an avalanche of unconnected results, you can quickly use pre- and post-search filters to narrow results sets to what matters most in the moment—whether you’re looking for background on an industry or company, monitoring media mentions of your brand, or conducting third party due diligence.

MORE: Search like a pro with these Nexis search pro tips

Answer your most pressing questions with power searches

1.    Search suggestions

Starting your business research off with our flagship Nexis® research platform—or any of our other solutions—means you have access to a world-leading source universe of news, company, and legal information. But with 50,000 sources and a news archive that goes back 40+ years, a broad search could result in information overload.

And, it’s an intuitive process. Simply start typing topics into the Index Terms field on the Power Search page and it will suggest relevant SmartIndexing terms covering a Subject, Industry, Geography or Company. Not sure where to start? You can also browse the list of Subject Terms for a quick steer in the right direction.  

2.    Power topics

All of our research platforms offer search flexibility to meet a variety of user needs and experience levels. More comfortable with a natural language search? We’ve got you covered. Ready to create Boolean queries? That’s an option too. But you don’t need to build a complex search string to pull in targeted results, thanks to expert-created Power Topics. For example, adding the term “Business News” to your search will return only documents that have been tagged for one of the 1,200 “Business News” related terms. Likewise, excluding the term “Financial Market Updates” allows you to remove stocks, shares, or market updates from a business news searchbusiness news search. Talk about a time saver! Using a Power Topic is equivalent to a query with 30,000 Boolean operators, keywords, and sources—in just a few clicks.

3.    Targeted alerts

Staying on top of industry trends, competitor mentions in the news, and other timely topics is easier with LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology. Because the content we aggregate goes through a normalization and enrichment process, you can use index terms to track specific events, such as M&A activity within your industry. After conducting the initial search, simply save the query to re-run the search on an ad-hoc basis or to receive email notifications when new content is available on the topic.

See for yourself. Arrange a test drive of Nexis or Nexis Uni to experience a smarter approach to focused research.