A visual search engine for information exploration

It would be really great if .:. Gurusoft .:. makes it.

It would make all of us, abridged from Abridge, feel vindicated. It's great that so many of our ideas and prototypes of early 2001 are surfacing in one shape or another all over the world...

EasyAsk Listed in 'Visionary' Quadrant of Gartner's 2004 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search

EasyAsk's Enterprise 9 enables enterprises to quickly, easily and comprehensively search for critical business information in structured and unstructured data, regardless of format or location, and be rewarded with only relevant results. Enterprise 9 users search or browse for relevant information using keywords, phrases, natural language questions, common terms and/or business-specific nomenclature.

BlueLithium Unveils BlueTheory, First One-to-One Online Advertising Platform Connecting Web Users with Relevant Ads

BlueLithium's BlueTheory uses natural language processing to understand Web content and sends an ad that matches the relevancy of the content. The publisher receives phenomenal returns for their content, the advertiser reaches new customers, and the consumer appreciates the relevant advertising without compromising privacy or the overall Internet experience.

Scientific American: Talking to Bill Gates

Scientific American: Talking to Bill Gates - on artificial intelligence, computer sciences education and more (click here for the full interview in PDF)

Explaining business concepts using NLP

Now, this was a surprise: usually we go through hoops and contortions to explain NLP concepts and use any possible analogy to make them clearer. Ephraim Schwartz at InfoWorld is doing just the opposite: he is using NLP concepts to explain supply chain by numbers:

From a common-sense point of view, the way statistical analysis works seems illogical. The more complex a data set becomes, for instance, the easier it is to make predictions.

For example, take NLU (natural language understanding) research. If I begin with only the word “the,” a computer program would have far less than a 1 percent chance of predicting the remainder of the sentence. However, if I add the word “day” to follow “the,” making the sentence more complex, the likelihood of guessing the third word might be 50 percent or better. The word “day” is singular and “the day” will require a verb.

Does this mean natural language processing is becoming more mainstream?

Simplifying a complex art

At the three-day-long AAACL Symposium in Montclair, NJ, I enjoyed a very nicely done presentation titled "Where have we been and where are we going" in Natural Language Processing (including speech, corpus linguistics, machine translation) from Ken Church (now a Senior Researcher at Microsoft).

While reading the article linked in the title, I agree: there are so many concepts and ideas in our field too that need to be translated to everyday language. Ken, by the way, even though he was speaking to a group of experts in the field, kept it very simple and informative.

MSN *bots ready for the testers

MSN will launch Newsbot a search tool that aggregates news from over 4000 sources worldwide and Blogbot a tool that produces relevant search results from blogs by the end of this year. Answerbot, which will feature a natural language interface for displaying search results, will arrive in the next wave following Newsbot and Blogbot.

The Fight Against Spam

The Fight Against Spam, by François Joseph de Kermadec -- In last week's Part 1 of this series, François Joseph de Kermadec showed you how to build the foundation for spam-fighting strategies. In Part 2, he fine-tunes this approach and digs deeper into Mail.app.

Even though the title is about spam, it contains a nice, non-geek introduction to Vector Space and Latent Semantic Analysis clustering.

LREC-2004, Lisbon, Portugal

4th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION (LREC) "In Memory of Antonio Zampolli" expects more than 1000 participants in Lisbon.

EZArchive Launches Advanced Search and Retrieval to Optimize Personal Media Asset Management

EZArchive’s search and retrieval capabilities will incorporate both keyword and natural language search to provide the most sophisticated means for users to quickly and easily locate digital media.

InQuira Doubles Deployments, Releases New Version

InQuira software enables customers to get information via the Web, instant messaging or e-mail. Using semantics and an industry-specific dictionary, the software searches across a variety of enterprise information repositories to quickly find the best information based on a customer query. They also apply this same technology to the call center, so that customer service representatives can handle more calls and resolve more issues faster.

Single click generates lists to end all lists

KnowItAll, a search engine under development at the University of Washington, Seattle, trawls the web for data and then collates it in the form of a list.