Semantic Search Arrives at the Web

Semantic Search Arrives at the Web: "Semantic search has attracted a lot of attention in the past year, largely due to the growth of the semantic web as a whole. The term semantic search itself is popular enough to be considered overused. The term refers to searching large semantic web datasets, which is a typical problem for semantic web search engines such as Swoogle, Sindice, SWSE, Falcon-S, and Watson. The term also refers to methods of searching web documents beyond the syntactic level of matching keywords. This article discusses semantic search in this second sense." (Article by Peter Mika @ Yahoo)

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.'"

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."

Gates Sees Diminished Role for Keyboards: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Gates Sees Diminished Role for Keyboards: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance: "People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said.
'It's one of the big bets we're making,' he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company's daily operations in July."

Technology Review: Q&A: Peter Norvig

Q&A: Peter Norvig: We think what's important about natural language is the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for. But we don't think it's a big advance to be able to type something as a question as opposed to keywords. Typing 'What is the capital of France?' won't get you better results than typing 'capital of France.' But understanding how words go together is important. To give some examples, 'New York' is different from 'York,' but 'Vegas' is the same as 'Las Vegas,' and 'Jersey' may or may not be the same as 'New Jersey.' That's a natural-language aspect that we're focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we're not concentrating on the sentence. We think it's important to get the right results rather than change the interface.


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