Monday, May 26, 2008

Teragram Integrates Linguistic Tools with Apache Lucene

Teragram Integrates Linguistic Tools with Apache Lucene: "'Lucene is expanding its user base to high-profile corporate and consumer-facing websites around the world, and quickly becoming the open source alternative to traditional enterprise search,' said Dr. Yves Schabes, president and co-founder of Teragram. 'We're happy to provide Lucene users with language processing enhancements so they can meet the high-performance standards of traditional enterprise search engines, while still enjoying the freedom of the open source experience.'"


Monday, May 12, 2008

Powerset, with new search technology, launches today - SiliconValley.com

Powerset, with new search technology, launches today - SiliconValley.com: "Now based in San Francisco, the core of Powerset's technology was developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Resarch Center (PARC), which is famous for incubating breakthroughs like the computer mouse and the graphical user interface. Pell's co-founder Lorenzo Thione is a research scientist who has worked at CommerceNet consortium and the Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory. About 25 of Powerset's 60 employees have Ph.Ds., mostly in computational linguistics.
Google has also hired dozens of specialists in computational linguistics, though its executives warn it will take years before machines can truly understand human text.
In the meantime, Powerset may face a bigger challenge: turning its computational break throughs into cash."


Powerset Debuts With Search of Wikipedia - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Powerset Debuts With Search of Wikipedia - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog: "Ask “Who did Henry VIII marry?” or “What did the FDA ban?” or “What did Bill Clinton sign?” and Powerset will come up with remarkably good answers. (Incidentally, Google does a decent job of answering the first of these questions but not the other two.) Powerset also has other nifty features, like its ability to create mini-dossiers that summarize the information it finds and to take users directly to a section of a document that is most relevant to their search. But Powerset remains a long way off from its promise and faces a seemingly intractable problem: for a very large fraction, if not the vast majority, of searches, keywords work just fine."


Powerset unveils semantic Wikipedia search tool

Article Reuters: "SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Powerset on Sunday unveiled tools for searching Wikipedia that use conversational phrasing instead of keywords, marking the first step of its challenge to established Web search services such as Google.
Powerset's technology breaks down the meaning of words and sentences into related concepts, freeing users from always needing to type the exact words they want to find."