- hyphen

One-way synonym rings

Placing a hyphen after a term in a synonym ring tells Perceptive Search not to expand on that term if it is the actual search term entered. For example, the ring:

cat, feline, moggie, siamese, tabby, manx

...contains both general terms for 'cat', and specific breeds of cat. When searching for 'cat', it would be appropriate to also find references to specific breed names. However, when searching for 'siamese', it would probably be inappropriate to also find 'tabby'. If the more specific terms in the ring are marked with a hyphen thus:

cat, feline, moggie, siamese-, tabby-, manx-

...then searching for 'cat' would return all six items in the ring, but a search for 'tabby' or 'siamese' would return only 'tabby' and 'siamese' respectively.

~ tilde

Tense conflation

Placing a tilde (generally found next to the number '1' on your keyboard) after a word in a synonym ring tells Perceptive Search to find all tense forms of that word. This can have two effects on your search.

If you run a query using the word 'management' and have 'management~' in a ring with other words (e.g. administration, control), Perceptive Search will add the conflation of 'management' to the words in the ring and search for all of them.

If you run a query on 'manage', Perceptive Search will match this to 'management~' because 'manage' is a conflation of 'management'. If 'management~' is the head of a synonym ring, all other terms in the ring will be entered in the search as well.

You can set up a single-word synonym ring containing a single conflated word. This has the effect of turning on conflation for a single term without having to switch options in Options. For more information about tense conflation, see Special symbols.

* asterisk

Wildcard

Replacing part of a word form with an asterisk tells Perceptive Search to find all words that fit that word form. For example, if you set up a ring with 'price*', any search that used that ring would also include 'priceless', 'prices', 'pricey' and any other words in the index that begin with the characters 'price'.

Unlike conflation, however, wildcards do not work in reverse. In the above example, a search for 'priceless' would not find 'price', so no synonym expansion would take place. For more information about wildcards, see Special symbols .