Powerset?
Does anyone know what's going on with powerset.
I tried to join their powerlabs program to get a closer look, but so far I haven't heard anything.
Anyone know when they are going to really launch?
as long as there is a lot money in search, there will be a lot of people competing for it, and people funding them. And the very least it will do is keep google on its toes, which is good.
their front page is still a bit messy for my taste, but they've really upped the ante for google in ways that no other search engine i've seen thus far has.
www.yahoo.com is a portal page with a search box.
I understand that you guys are taking on a profound and very important challenge. And I am very much wishing the venture success. I think that NLIs eventually will become a dominant interface solution for many tasks, search included. I look forward to looking into what you guys have.
BTW are you doing anything in domain specific search? Feel free to reply at mjm@anaphoric.com or mjm@cs.umu.se.
Regards, MM
The reason why I asked about closed domain work is because that's what I am working on. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWio8bHq4wQ
With all due respect, I doubt if they have the brain power to create something to dethrone Google. Google has some incredible people working on search.
A couple of years ago, when the Yahoo vs Google war for search dominance was at its peak, I asked a friend of mine who worked at Yahoo, "Who is your equivalent of Peter Norvig? " (who was then Google's Director of Search Quality - today he is Director of Research) and after some hemming and hawing he told me " well, we don't have anyone like that but then we are a media company, not a search company.("We are a media company" was the mantra Terry Semel was repeating at Yahoo then) and I knew then that Yahoo would never beat Google (in search).
I wonder what the Powerset guys tell themselves? I find the internal mythologies of companies fascinating.
PARC has certainly done brilliant,pioneering work in many areas. What most people miss is that PARC had many deadwood/unsuccessful projects (and people and worthless papers ) in its time.
I know nothing about what exactly PARC licensed to Powerset, but without more data, I wouldn't automatically assume that it provides an edge.
My understanding is that the technology Powerset got from Xerox is a production quality, multiple language parsing system with a language-independent core, with the long development time being due to the engineers being allowed to work on the problem until they had solved it to their satisfaction.
Of course, all of my information comes from the above-mentioned presentation, so a large pinch of salt is almost certainly required. :o)
The academic community has been working with semantic indexes for quite some time. I know many of those involved. The real question is whether they have developed something fundamental recently.
As for performance, yes perhaps they have some innovations. But with NLIs its usability that matters the most in the end.
At a more technical level I think the question is how expressive/consistent is the logical form they are mapping too. If they have developed a parser that maps to an LF that can lead to actual inferece then that would mean something. But then they need an open domain strategy to actually reason over such expressions in a meaningful/useful way. We will see.
Somewhere out there in the libraries are the computing equivalents of transparent aluminum, but you can barely get researchers to look at this stuff, let alone Joe Javahead.
As for you comment about researchers not being aware of the literature, I agree 100%. I review from time to time and the number of papers that are reinventing the wheel (and doing so in a sloppy way) is staggering. I think the problem is that too many researchers are just concerned with building up as many papers as possible to beat the tenure clock and/or to impress their rivals.
Evaluators somehow need to stop bean counting publications as a measure of merit. The problem they face is they don't know how else to evaluate...
Plus, when computer science was new, a lot of crazy stuff was being researched; nowadays the academic research seems pretty close-minded.
The latest cool robots an' stuff that the media wants to report on, are generally based on AI ideas decades old; and the newest most brilliant ideas of AI today, may not yield impressive technology for years to come.
If PARC developed Powerset's ideas 30 years ago, that might just be par for the course.
My own feeling is that NLIs can be useful, but really only in closed domains. In fact my own efforts are toward NLIs to relational databases.
If I understand their approach, they are building semantic indicies over large sets of documents (e.g. wikipedia). Sure you can match the user's query using these indicies but the inference thereafter certainly must be very weak. Yes any functionality this gives could probably be achieved with simple IR based techniques.
Still I am curious about how this will all go down once they launch a public interface... Still, I will be pleased if they actually show something of value. Time will tell.