New Semantic Map Will Improve Internet Searches
Posted on: Thursday, 18 September 2008, 15:45 CDT
Cognition Technologies released a new semantic map this week that teaches computers the true meanings behind words. The company began licensing the map, which would give computers a vocabulary far more extensive than that of an average college graduate, to software creators on Tuesday.
Using the new map, these software developers can write programs that “understand” words based on context and tense, similar to the way the human brain works.
"We have taught the computer virtually all the meanings of words and phrases in the English language," said Scott Jarus, Cognition’s CEO, during an interview with AFP.
"This is clearly a building block for Web 3.0, or what is known as the Semantic Web. It has taken 30 years; it is a labor of love.”
The map is believed to be the largest semantic map in the world, and provides computers a robust vocabulary 10 times that of a typical college graduate.
The upcoming third generation of life online is expected to feature intuitive artificial intelligence applications that work rapidly with broadband Internet connections. For Internet searches, the technology will deliver results better suited to the information people actually seek, not merely those sites with matching words.
For instance, a semantic Internet search using the words "melancholy songs with birds" would be smart enough to link sadness in lyrics with various species of birds.
Cognition's semantic map is already incorporated into LexisNexis Concordance "e-discovery" software to sort through documents collected during evidence phases of trials.
"We help them find the needle in a haystack," said Jarus.
"It used to be boxes and boxes of paper and now 80 percent of it is digital. Lawyers can search for a smoking gun within that discovery material."
According to Cognition, its Caselaw program uses the technology to mine more than 50 years of court decisions for legal precedents.
The map is also implemented within a widely used medical database.
And the company says the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is also “semantically enabled”.
One goal of Web 3.0 is to develop artificial intelligence "agents" that mine vast amounts of Internet data for material that meets users’ interests.
"It would be a software application constantly looking for things you might be interested in while accurately understanding the concepts of what you are looking for," Jarus said, describing it as "artificial intelligence agents working for you on a push basis instead of a pull basis."
Cognition has a few competitors, although each firm seems to be taking its own independent approach to the technology.
Microsoft acquired San Francisco-based Powerset in July. Although financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, unconfirmed reports said that Microsoft might have paid as much as 100 million dollars for the three-year-old start-up that specializes in interpreting Internet searches.
Microsoft said it plans to use Powerset’s technology to upgrade its free Live Search service, which has lagged in third place behind Yahoo and Google.
Powerset's semantic search merges engineering with linguistics in a software platform that determines the specific information users are seeking based on questions or phrases. Standard search engines typically respond only to the individual words used in the query.
Satya Nadella, senior vice president of search, portal and advertising at Microsoft, said that a third of today's online searches fail to provide people with the information they are seeking on the first try.
"Search engines don't understand today that 'shrub' and 'tree' are similar concepts," Nadella wrote in a blog posting.
"We don't understand that 'cancer' sometimes refers to a disease and sometimes refers to a horoscope and when a query or a webpage refers to which."
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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User Comments (1)
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Posted by Syd on 09/19/2008, 01:20 Though the mapper might improve searches, I still prefer a Semantic database which wont require any mapper in the first place. |
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