
Powerset and Natural Language Search Talk by Barney Pell (Powerset, Founder and CEO) - amichail
http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/details.cgi?id=613
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gibsonf1
After watching the entire video, it sounds like the system they are building
fundamentally operates at a linguistic level with no attempt to really model
underlying concepts and relations in a human way. A questioner asked how their
approach compares to CYC (The company trying to model all human common sense
knowledge with bad epistemology and contradictions), and he explained that
they aren't even trying to model concepts in that way, but rather finding
relations through linguistic analysis. I think the way to think about what
they're doing is a very advanced pattern matching approach with definite
limitations. For example, you can't ask their system to find contradictions
between what someone said as it doesn't "understand" contradiction, etc. He
said there would be a 5 minute tutorial on the kind of questions you can and
can't ask.

I think that there is the danger, and he mentions it as well, in people having
too high expectations when using NL to query their system. They apparently
have exclusive license to use PARC technology finally finished in 2003, so I'm
sure that there will be some interesting results. The question is will it
frustrate people by its limitations so much that they move away, or will it
excite people about the possibilities of a system that could actually
"understand" what the concepts mean that they are expressing. The latter would
be great news for Organontech.

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machine
I think they do have some modeling of underlying concepts. I think if I
remember correctly they had a search where "politician" matched "mayor", so
they at least have synonyms. I think they obviously would like to have
understanding--it's just that NLP isn't there yet.

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gibsonf1
I agree, they do have concepts, but not in a _human_ way. One questioner asked
what their conceptual schema looks like, and the CEO said that it is basically
the same as typical ontologies out there but with a few more links between
concepts. We looked closely at OWL and RDF and CYC and all the other ontology
languages we could find to see if it was possible to meaningfully capture
_human_ like conceptualization with these languages, and it isn't - they are
extremely far from providing a framework for successfully doing it. A
radically new framework is needed to make progress conceptually - which is
what we are working on.

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amichail
Some questions:

\- For the sorts of queries he mentions in the talk, can't you just use
Google's wildcard queries to get similar results?

\- Can you use a more social web 2.0 approach to address difficult and/or
natural language queries? If so how?

\- What if you allowed the system to get back to you later with answers
(possibly several hours later)? Is a social approach more feasible then?

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machine
The answer to your first question is no. For example if you wanted to search
for "What did Al Gore say?", a google wild card search for "Al Gore said
wildcard" (the markup won't let me put an asterisk) would not match things
like "blah, said Al Gore" or "he said blah" where he is referring to Al Gore,
or "Al Gore told someone blah". For the search engine to match those results,
some level of parsing is needed.

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amichail
Yes, but if this is an an important news item, what he said would probably be
mentioned on many web pages in many forms, including a form that matches your
query.

