Current Events > Is there a field of study that describes this?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Basically I'm wondering if there's a field of study that investigates information discovery and how best to make relevant information accessible when you look for it, even if you don't know what to look for. I understand that we do a lot of things like this with machine learning and Metadata indexing, but I'm curious if there's research or premises that generalize what ml algorithms brute force their way to.

Sort of a bridge between pedagogy and information architecture/ information theory I guess

Maybe ontology (CS version), I don't know that much about it though.

You might also look at computational linguistics.

SEO? Search Engine Optimization

If you are trying to do it from a coding perspective it's machine learning. If you are trying to do it from a linguistic perspective it's debate or philosophy (depending on if there is an expected/actualized answer or not). From a code perspective there is no better way to do what you are talking about than machine learning as brute forcing through code is *vastly* superior to anything you can do by hand. Much like how making something recursive or inverse can make some logical steps super trivial compared to the alternative (something, something "Tower of Hanoi") things that are commonly brute forced through ML is done explicitly that way because the alternatives are either unreasonably hard or impossible to do otherwise. Inversely if you are not talking about the code itself and instead on recognizing problems debate is a good way to recognize when someone's desired end goal and what they are saying are not equivalents or when a statement being made is not actually giving the information that they want it to say.

The way that I think about this problem that makes ml a poor solution is how to write and structure documentation in such a way as to increase signal to noise ratio of communications and increase discoverability of relevant documentation without having the documentation be unreadable spaghetti.