Your Basic Metamorph Search

Metamorph has often been classified as a form of Artificial Intelligence since its functions fall into the categories of knowledge acquisition, natural language processing, and intelligent text retrieval.

The software attempts in its own way to understand your question, represent its understanding to the data in the files, and come up with relevant responses as retrieved portions of full text information which best correspond to your questions.

Metamorph's vocabulary is around 250,000+ word connections, constructed in a dense web of associations and equivalences. Search parameters can be adjusted to dynamically dictate surface and deep inference. The program's responses can be controlled so that they are direct or abstract in relation to your questions. Proximity of concept can be fine tuned so as to qualify degree of relevance, providing matches which are sometimes concrete, sometimes abstract.

Think of your text as a field of information which was put together by a human being for a stated purpose; the Equivalence File acts as an intelligent language filter through which relevant associations occurring as common denominators can be located and retrieved out of the information in those files.

Metamorph retrieves data as a match to queries for response from any text. Metamorph can search files which are not flat ASCII, but it is the ASCII characters which will be recognized.

To help you get started, some demo text files are supplied with the Texis package. These are files in the "c:\morph3\text" directory if you installed on Drive C in DOS or Windows; or in the "/usr/local/morph3/text" directory if you are on Unix:

Filenamexxx = Description  
Filename > Description  
alien       > science fiction excerpts 
constn      > the US Constitution 
declare     > the US Declaration of Independence 
garden      > descriptive prose 
kids        > children's adventure stories 
liberty     > Patrick Henry's "liberty or death" speech 
events      > downloaded news information from mid 1990 
qadhafi     > magazine interview with Mohamar Qadhafi 
socrates    > summary from Plato's Republic about Socrates.

Let's say you have set things up one way or another to be searching these demo text files, and have Texis set up to type in a query. The easiest thing to do is think of a few concepts or keywords you'd like to see matched near each other in a sentence. For example, "power" and "struggle". This can be entered on the query line as "power struggle", where your default proximity is set to search by sentence. Or if it has not, you can enter your query as "power struggle w/sent". If you have enabled Metamorph hit markup, you might retrieve a passage of text which could be set up to look something like this:

File: c:\morph3\text\events
PageNo: 11
Query: power struggle

 million whites and 28 million blacks.  []Charges range from using
 excessive FORCE on antigovernment protests and torture of detainees
 to openly backing the ANC's rival Zulu movement Inkatha in bloody
 CLASHES in Natal province.[]
     "It's a Frankenstein which has been created and inherited by a
 racist set-up," Slovo told a news conference, noting the ANC
 "reserves the right" to resume the armed struggle "should the
 government fail to carry out its undertakings."

In this example, this section of text was selected because the sentence marked by [] blocks at beginning and end matched the search request; i.e.:

Charges range from using excessive force on anti-government protests and torture of detainees to openly backing the ANC's rival Zulu movement Inkatha in bloody clashes in Natal province.

This sentence was selected as a hit because it contained a concept match to both concepts entered on the query line: i.e., "force" matched "power", and "clashes" matched "struggle".