Concordance Tip Sheet
March 2009 SEARCHING QUESTIONS In the course of my work, I am asked a lot of searching questions. Nothing personal – just questions about how best to search Concordance databases. We’ve been over the basics here, including the very cool Synonyms feature in my very first Tip (see http://www.arraytech.com/wedo.html#concordance_tips, October 2005). This month I’d like to go over a few “posers”, questions that have me scratching my head for a bit before I beat on my sample data for an answer. Later, we’ll see what went on at the first New York Metro Area Concordance User Group. Example 1: The Mask If you want to search a Concordance database to see if a Social Security number has slipped in, how do you do it? It uses a formatted presentation of ###‐##‐####, so we should be able to search using wildcards, right? We, yes, but not as a full‐text search. Just as full date wildcards (*/*/*) will bring up erratic results, you’ll want to be more specific in doing this kind of search. Start with what we know: the format of a Social Security number. We know there are an absolute number of places we need to account for in the left, middle and right portions. Therefore, our search should use the single‐character (?) wildcard rather than the open‐ended asterisk. So we try this search: ???‐??‐???? And Concordance responds with this: {00014269;1 }
The problem here is that Concordance doesn’t know what you are asking of the dictionary – there are only wildcards and two punctuation marks (the dashes), which themselves may or may not have been defined as searchable punctuation when the database was set up (under FILE / Modify). So what do you do? First, identify the field or fields that you want to search. Generally, this would be confined to an OCR or extracted TEXT field. Let’s call the field TEXT01. Therefore, you try this search: TEXT01 CO ???‐??‐???? Huzzah! It works, but… The bad news is, in a database where you have a lot of OCR or Extracted Text, this search could take quite a while. Also, since it is a “relational” search in Concordance parlance, you won’t be able to “Next Hit” right to the highlighted text, and since you don’t know what number turned up, you won’t be able to use the vertical search (EDIT / Find) to jump down the document to the hit. You’ll have to scroll and scan the old fashioned way – and when you find it, embed a Note immediately. Once you do find the first instance, you may then want to try a search for all other instances of that particular number. That fully expressed number will be full‐text searchable, as long as the dashes have been defined as searchable punctuation in setting up the database. Example 2: Very Fuzzy Dates Here’s the scenario: You have a case that hinges on chronology. Your adversary, however, has only supplied BEGNO, ENDNO, images and OCR. How do you compile actual or approximate dates short of (a) sending the images for coding or (b) using an autocoding technology such as Rosen Technology Resources Inc.’s ALCoder on your OCR? While Option(a) is the most comprehensive approach and Option(b) is far less expensive and reasonably precise in decent OCR, you already have Concordance, can’t that do anything? Well, yes it can. But before you get too excited, think about this: How many ways can you express a date in an English‐language document? Let’s our critical period is January 2005 through March 2005. Here’s a list of ways that dates within this period could be represented: {00014269;1 }
Jan* ??, 2005 Jan*, 2005 Jan* 2005 ?? Jan* 2005 01/??/2005 01/??/05 1/??/2005 1/??/05 ??/01/05 ??/1/05 ??/01/2005 ??/1/2005 01/?/2005 01/?/05 1/?/2005 1/?/05 ?/01/05 ?/1/05 ?/01/2005 ?/1/2005 01/2005 1/2005 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 23 or 11 or 12 or 13 or 14 or 15 or 16 or 17 or 18 or 19 or 20 or 21 or 22 That’s 22 iterations for January alone, combined by the last two lines; you’ll need to do it for each month. Fortunately, you can use three additional Concordance tools to help you do this more efficiently: (a) QRY file save and execute – create a Text file using any text editor to copy and update the script for each month as efficiently as possible; each line needs only SEARCH: followed by a space to run. (b) Tagging – once you find all your January documents, you can tag them for grouping, then select the group for closer review and coding of the DOCDATE field. (c) Review – once you have retrieved and coded all the documents for each of the critical months, you can use the references to isolate any documents not falling within the critical period. For example, let’s say that you have already searched for the Tags January05, February05 and March05, created as discussed above; say these are {00014269;1 }
listed in the Review screen as Search 00001, Search 00002 and Search 00003. Search 00000 is always the entire database. So to retrieve all documents that are not part of the three tags searched in 1 through 3, use this statement: 0 not (1 or 2 or 3) This will help to uncover any handwritten documents that cannot be OCRed. It works; but if someone offers to code your whole database for dates or supply you with ALCoder, say Yes! USER GROUP FOLLOW‐UP NOTES The first meeting of the New York Metro Area Concordance User Group, held February 26, 2009 at the offices of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler LLP in New York City, was of clear benefit to all concerned. Karen Hendrickson welcomed the participants on behalf of the host firm. Natalie Biggs ably represented LexisNexis in presenting the planned product roadmap for 2009 and noting comments and requests to pass along. Your faithful correspondent demonstrated EL Native Review for Concordance to a positive reception. Lively discussion, tips, comments and questions ensued. Briefly, for all who were there and those who were not, here is a list of follow‐up questions, along with some answers from Trent Walton of Electronic Legal regarding EL Native Review: Questions / requests for EL Native Review: • When in Edit mode in EL Native Review will it lock the record in Concordance? There is a write lock on the record, which is released when the user goes to the next document. • When will batch printing be available? The developers are looking into it for a future release. Meanwhile, you can print any document one at a time independent of its native application. • Is this going to be available in FYI? This release is planned for May 1st, and will work like Opticon / Image. It will queue up documents in the current list in background to improve performance. {00014269;1 }
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Has this been tested in large environments? Yes. At this time, some large Colorado firms (Electronic Legal is based in Denver) are running thousands of licenses of EL Native Review. •
When setting up custom file extensions or other custom settings, can the changes be made globally or will does it have to be set up per user? The first release version due March 31st (I demoed a preview release) will have an Admin tool for global push of settings. •
Can EL Native review be set up to auto reindex [updates to Coding field]? Could be but won’t, on performance grounds. •
Will EL Native review allow the ability to edit more than one field in the near future? The developers are looking closely at this capability as well for a future release. •
Can a button be made available in Concordance to launch the EL Native Review application similar to the camera button? In all likelihood, there will be a menu entry under Tools, since this is easier to set up and doesn’t involve messing with the Concordance interface. •
Would like to have the ability to have multi‐database syncing. •
This refers to EL Native Review serving one database at a time on open, and having to be re‐opened to serve a different electronic database. This is feasible using threading, but the development team wanted to bring a relatively simple, feature‐complete product to market first, then add more complex capabilities from there. Currently concatenated databases will display an error and then render a viewable document. This is in all likelihood a pre‐release copy issue. Questions / requests for Lexis Nexis: {00014269;1 }
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Would like an interactive debugger. •
Better documentation. •
Auto tag family documents. •
Rule based tagging. •
Undo. •
Dragging tags to another folder. •
Better way to sort and rename tags. •
Improved version of Report Writer. Meetings will be held on a quarterly basis, with the next meeting tentatively set for May 28th. If you missed the first meeting, plan to make the second! More information as it becomes available. © 2009 Array Technology Group LLC NEWS UPDATES: Inside the Silo: Managing Electronic Data Before and During Trial, a joint Kazeon/Concordance seminar on managing and reviewing large electronic documents, will take place on Tuesday, April 7th from 9am to 12:00pm at the LexisNexis New York City conference center, 125 Park Avenue, across from Grand Central Station. See how Kazeon can quietly and efficiently gather and index corporate data across the enterprise and hand off to Concordance for electronic document review. Drop me a line if you are interested in signing up – seats are limited, so don’t put it off! ‐‐ Andy Kass [email protected] 212‐460‐8169 x202 ARRAY TECHNOLOGY GROUP
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