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Building a Better Search Engine
A new natural-language system is based on 30 years of research at PARC.
Michael Reisman, Technology Review, July 27, 2007
Excerpts from the article:
Powerset, Inc., based in San Francisco, is on the verge of offering an innovative natural-language search engine, based on linguistic research at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
Even though attempts have been made at natural-language search for decades, Powerset says that its system is different because it has solved some of the fundamental technological problems that have existed with this kind of search. It has done so by developing a product that is deep, computationally advanced, and still economically viable.
Pell says that it's difficult to pinpoint one particular technological breakthrough, but he believes that Powerset's superiority lies in the three decades of hard work by scientists at PARC.
A key component of the search engine is a deep natural-language processing system that extracts the relationships between words; the system was developed from PARC's Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) platform. The framework that this platform is based on, called Lexical Functional Grammar, enabled the team to write different grammar engines that help the search engine understand text. This includes a robust, broad-coverage grammar engine written by PARC. Pell also claims that the engine is better than others at dealing with ambiguity and determining the real meaning of a question or a sentence on a Web page. All these innovations make the system more adaptable, he says, so that it can extract deep relationships from text.
Powerset chief technology officer Ron Kaplan has led PARC's XLE team since the 1970s and is the author of much of the technology behind XLE that has been licensed to the company.
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