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Re:Powerset and Natural Language Search Talk by Barney Pell ... by gibsonf1 on Friday May 11, 2007 @01:52AM (#21257)
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.

Re:Powerset and Natural Language Search Talk by Barney Pell ... by machine on Friday May 11, 2007 @03:05AM (#21265)
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.
Re:Powerset and Natural Language Search Talk by Barney Pell ... by gibsonf1 on Friday May 11, 2007 @07:21AM (#21291)
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.