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Peakon
Last Updated: 2026-05-15
Concept: Semantic Search for Comments

Concept: Semantic Search for Comments

All managers with access to comments can enter a search term to surface comments containing the searched keyword. However, Semantic Search understands the contextual meaning of a phrase and relationships between words, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in the comment. Advanced filtering helps speed up investigations and narrow results.
Semantic Search is available to all customers as a core part of the Workday Peakon service. The feature uses natural language processing (NLP) to help you surface the most insightful and relevant comments related to a search query. It enables you to find out what's important to your employees in their own words.
Example
: When searching for the word
acquisition
, Semantic Search would return comments also including the words
buy-out
,
sale
,
purchase
, and so on.
Semantic Search is powered by a global text-embedding model, which converts tokenized comment text and search query text into embeddings.

Considerations

  • The feature provides better results with longer search phrases and sentences. The semantic technology can return specific matches if provided with maximum context. Example: Searching for
    efforts to support engagement
    and
    an engaged workforce
    , yields better results than searching for just
    engagement
    .
  • Semantic Search doesn’t rank comments based on their sentiment, when matching the search query. Example: If you search
    I love my job
    , then
    I hate my job
     will display near the top of the results. Filter results based on their NPS, to account for sentiment and to find the positive or negative comments associated with a search.
  • Semantic Search orders all available comments from most relevant to least relevant, based on the contextual meaning of your search query. Regardless if your search uses filtering, the displayed comments become less relevant the further you scroll through the results.
  • The semantic search export enables you to download the first 1,000 results from the comment rankings, sorted by relevancy to the search query.
  • Semantic Search includes comments written in all supported languages when Comment Translation is enabled. If Comment Translation is not enabled, it supports only English comments.