AI could answer survey questions in several languages instead of just in the language asked

I use Logos in Portuguese. I have less than a thousand books in my language and almost 4 thousand in English, a hundred in Spanish, plus a thousand in other languages. But when I ask a question in Portuguese, the AI only returns books in Portuguese. Having to repeat the same question in each language for the AI to return an answer in each is not efficient. And, as far as I can tell, if I ask in English with the Logos interface being in Portuguese, it returns answers that are too imprecise (e.g., "What is the difference between Paul and James on justification?". This same question in Portuguese returned very good answers.

(1) There could be a standard way of getting the answer by searching all the books regardless of language.

(2) Or there could be an option for me to select that I want a search and answer in more languages.

(3) There could be a way to personalize the answer you get. For example: "Show the five best answers to the difference between Paul and James." When I ask it this, the AI returns as many answers as possible instead of just 5. This would make the answers faster.

Print screen 1 (Portuguese query returned only Portuguese results)

Print screen 2 (Question in English with the interface in Portuguese returned results in both Portuguese and English, but the results were very bad (inaccurate))

Print screen 3 (The same question 2, now asked in Portuguese, returned more accurate results).

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Adam Borries (Logos)

Crosspost:

We've made improvements to English language detection in Smart Search. When using non-English UI, Smart Search now detects when a query is in English, and ranks English results appropriately. (It will not, as suggested in idea #1 above, attempt to interpret and answer the question from resources in all languages.) This change is live in both the desktop and web apps.

Note that does not effect other language combinations; the best way to get results for another (non-English) language that differs from your app language is still to create a collection of books in that language. For example, If you use the app in Portuguese, and you want to use Smart Search for a Spanish query, search a collection of Spanish books.

Feedback and testing needed:
How often does Smart Search promote results in a language you were not expecting? How well does it work for one-word queries?

Anderson Abreu

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1287719#Comment_1287719

Crosspost:

Feedback and testing needed:

How often does Smart Search promote results in a language you were not expecting? How well does it work for one-word queries?

The single-word search seemed very precise and efficient. For example, when I searched for "predestination" in both English and Portuguese, the results were focused on texts that define the term and delve into the origin and development of the doctrine.

Anderson Abreu

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1287719#Comment_1287719

Crosspost:

Note that does not effect other language combinations; the best way to get results for another (non-English) language that differs from your app language is still to create a collection of books in that language. For example, If you use the app in Portuguese, and you want to use Smart Search for a Spanish query, search a collection of Spanish books.

But for those who use bilingual or multilingual libraries, it's frustrating to have to repeat the same question in several languages.
There should be a solution so that the AI receives the command to first translate into each desired (specified) language and returns the results in all the requested languages automatically and sorts by the best regardless of language.

Wouldn't it be possible to ask a question to the search AI and, for example, write an operator in brackets at the end: (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin), so that the AI understands that I want it to translate the question and search in the languages specified?

Dave Hooton

(3) There could be a way to personalize the answer you get. For example: "Show the five best answers to the difference between Paul and James." When I ask it this, the AI returns as many answers as possible instead of just 5. This would make the answers faster.

Smart Search is not a query language i.e. it will not interpret "when" where" "what" (or "show"). You will get better results:

by including as many books as possible:

all books in your library (in Books Search)
your library and unlicensed books (in ALL Search)

by removing "query" words e.g. try

difference between Paul and James on justification, or
Paul and James on justification

it will still return results with "difference".

To show the impact of noise words like "and", "on" I used Paul and James on justification with my Lexicon collection, which is definitely non-theological with many Greek and Hebrew words! Viewing results by Book, the majority were for "and" with some lexicons returning 2000 results! The results from viewing by None were a little better!

Anderson Abreu

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1293811#Comment_1293811

by including as many books as possible:

all books in your library (in Books Search)

your library and unlicensed books (in ALL Search)

The points I made were "suggestions" of how the search could ideally work in my opinion. I know it doesn't work like a GPT Chat, for example. Possibly my bad English didn't help to communicate what I wanted to say.

The most important thing for me would be point 1, to be able to search all the books in the library (English, Portuguese, Spanish) regardless of the language entered (English, Portuguese, Spanish) and get the result in all these languages by asking a single question. As smart search currently works, I need to do the same search in each language. This is inefficient.

Perhaps for the vast majority of Logos users who are native English speakers this is irrelevant because you can get by with a library and a search in English only. But this is not the case for users of other languages to which Logos and Verbum have expanded. In the case of other countries and languages, we can't afford to be satisfied with books only in our native languages. For example, I have 5x more books in English than in Portuguese. So if Faithlife wants to expand and consolidate itself in other countries/languages, it needs to pay attention to this issue.

Now do you understand the situation?

That's why I made that other post about research in bilingual or multilingual libraries.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1293860#Comment_1293860

Your point is well-made and appropriate to many users - for Verbum it is the English-Latin pair. However, Logos is utilizing 3rd party AI services where they must conform to the 3rd parties requirements. You would be more likely to get quick results in the precise search where Logos owns the coding and there already is a parsing of a query language.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1293860#Comment_1293860

The points I made were "suggestions" of how the search could ideally work in my opinion. I know it doesn't work like a GPT Chat, for example. Possibly my bad English didn't help to communicate what I wanted to say.

Your English is fine. But you made the point of "answering" survey questions "in the language asked" and used examples that are questions. I understood your point about working with several languages

Anderson Abreu

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1293963#Comment_1293963

But you made the point of "answering" survey questions "in the language asked" and used examples that are questions.

Ah, yes. I see your point now.

It's just that because it's a "search" tool, in my mind it's a kind of "question" even when I type in just one or two words, on Google for example.

Another reason is that this post was written in my first hours of testing intelligent search and I came to the test with the GPT chat in my head as a reference lol.

On the other hand, I was led to this by the tool's own explanation, because when I opened it, it said: "Enter you query using short questions or keywords, e.g. When was Augustine of Hippo born? [...]" So this further reinforced the idea of typing in questions. Only later did I realize that it works with words and simple sentences.

Anderson Abreu

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1293860#Comment_1293860

The most important thing for me would be point 1, to be able to search all the books in the library (English, Portuguese, Spanish) regardless of the language entered (English, Portuguese, Spanish) and get the result in all these languages by asking a single question. As smart search currently works, I need to do the same search in each language. This is inefficient.

I'll correct and specify that part more:

The most important thing for me would be point 1, to be able to do a search in all the books in the library (English, Portuguese, Spanish, Latin etc) regardless of the language in which I typed the search (English or Portuguese) and to get the result in all these languages by typing once in a single language to search. As intelligent search currently works, I have to do the same search by typing in each language for which I want the result. This is inefficient and laborious, and so I can't get the most out of my purchased multilingual library or even search through all the books available for sale in the Logos store (which I think is fantastic!).

Email me replies to this post.