Watson Discovery Passage Length

Question

I am finding that the passages returned by Discovery are generally very good choices... but they are too short and truncated at odd points... even mid sentence. A couple of questions:

Is there a way to control the passage length returned?

Is there a way to bring the user directly to the passage within the full document?

Answer 1

It looks like they Discovery Query API now supports controlling the passage length, although the SDK's (Java and NodeJS) haven't been updated yet to support it.

passages.characters     The approximate number of 
              query     characters that any one passage should have. 
            integer     The default is 400. The minimum is 50. The
                        maximum is 2000. Note: The passages.characters 
                        parameter is supported only on private
                        collections. It is not supported in the 
                        Watson Discovery News collection. 

Answer 2

1) Currently, passage length is fixed at 200 characters, though it will generally not be exactly 200 as passages start and end at word boundaries.

2) No.

Answer 3

This is a problem with Watson Discovery. The answer seems to be if you need longer answers, to divide your documents into short sub-documents and make those part of your collection. For instance, I use discovery with my syllabus to help students who have questions about class and university policies. I divide each sub-section into its own document. Discovery can then produce the entire document (which is not more than a paragraph).