Noisewords

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(Go to:Topicscape Pro User Guide - contents list)

3D Topicscape's Advanced Search generally ignores common words and characters such as "a", "the" and "an", as well as single digits, because including them slows down the search without improving the results. We call these "noisewords". Some people call them "stop words". If you include words like this in your search string, 3D Topicscape will tell you and give you an option (by a checkbox) that allows you to have them included anyway. If you're looking for an item about "The Who", you will probably want to include noisewords in your search - or just remove the definition of "who" as a noiseword.

Initial list of noisewords

We provide a comprehensive list of what we consider to be noisewords when 3D Topicscape is installed.

Noisewords maintenance

The noisewords list can be added to or cut down, as you wish. The noisewords list in 3D Topicscape can be exported, and someone else's noiseword list can be imported. All this can be done from the Advanced Search panel, using the "Maintain Noisewords" button. To bring up the Advanced Search panel, when 3D Topicscape is running, press the space bar.

Noisewords maintenance can also be started from the Tools menu in the main toolbar.

Noiseword text file format

A noiseword file consists of a plain text file with one line per word and the word starting in the first character of the line. Noisewords defined in the file can contain punctuation or similar characters and can be no longer than 25 letters or numbers.

It is stored in a file called noiseworddefinition.ini which, in a default installation, will be in
C:\Program Files\Topicscape Pro 2\default\config

Here's a small extract:
a
ah
am
an
and
are
as
at
be
been
but
by
can
com
etc
few
for

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