Saturday, July 28, 2007

IBM Research | Almaden Research Center | Computer Science

IBM Research Almaden Research Center Computer Science: "An increasingly important class of keyword search tasks are those where users are looking for a specific piece of information buried within a few documents in a large collection. Examples include searching for (a) someone's phone number or a package tracking URL, within a personal email collection, (b) reviews from blogs and (c) internal homepage for a person or a group within the company intranet. While modern information extraction techniques can be used to extract the concepts involved in these tasks (persons, phone numbers, restaurant reviews, etc.), since users only provide keywords as input, the problem of identifying the documents that contain the information of interest remains a challenge.
In Avatar Semantic Search, we are building a solution to this problem based on the concept of automatically generating ``interpretations'' of keyword queries. Interpretations are precise structured queries, over the extracted concepts, that model the real intent behind a keyword query. We have formalized the notion of interpretations and are addressing the various challenges in identifying the most likely interpretations for a given keyword query. The resulting interpretations are presented in an intuitive interface resulting in a dialogue between the user and the system to determine the true user intent (as shown in the screenshots below).
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] "

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Technology Review: The Future of Search

Technology Review: The Future of Search: "The two biggest projects are machine translation and the speech project. Translation and speech went all the way from one or two people working on them to, now, live systems."