Student Loan Blog : linguistics

Could Google Go Obsolete?

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 05:29:00 GMT

The programmers and executives at San Francisco–based startup Powerset are hoping that the answer to this question will be “yes” once they debut their search engine that operates on natural-language technology.

Powerset finally offered its first public preview on September 17, reports Associated Press writer Michael Liedtke, at a conference hosted by TechCrunch, “a blog widely read by venture capitalists and other high-tech luminaries” (“Search Startup Ready to Challenge Google,” Sep. 17, 2007).

Powerset’s natural-language search engine would give Internet users a platform to conduct their searches in plain English—in other words, in the kinds of sentences people speak in real life—as opposed to by typing in an assortment of keywords.

Right now, all the major search engines—Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—use the traditional keyword-based model, with Google cornering more than half of all search engine traffic.

The difference between the two types of searching technologies has to do with how the search engine processes the search terms you type in when you want to find something on the Internet.

A keyword-based engine, like Google, basically disregards “minor” words like articles (a, an, the) and prepositions (in, by, about, etc.), and hones in on what it considers to be the most important terms. Natural-language engines take into account a string of words as a whole rather than looking at them as individual pieces.

For example, if you wanted to find information on student loans, in a natural-language search, you would type your request in the same way you would ask a person: “How much money can I get as an undergrad?” In a Google search, on the other hand, you would search by keywords like “undergrad money college” and hope to get results with information on maximum loan amounts. Change the order of your keywords—“money college undergrad”—and get different search results.

This distinction, writes Liedtke, means “Web surfers will theoretically be able to get more meaningful results by typing more precise search requests in the form of straightforward questions.”

Searches Going Au Naturel

Perhaps more buzzworthy than the natural-language engine itself is the fact that Powerset is licensing its technology from veteran powerhouse Palo Alto Research Center, the subsidiary of Xerox famed for introducing one revolutionary technology after another—laser printing, the graphical user interface (GUI), Ethernet networking, and the first commercial use of the computer mouse, just to name a few.

Ronald Kaplan, PARC’s top natural-language specialist, is now Powerset’s chief technology and science officer, Liedtke reports.

“We have the best natural-language search technology that has ever been developed,” says Barney Pell, Powerset’s co-founder and chief executive.

And he plans to take that technology, along with Powerset’s $12.5 million in venture capital, and give Mother Google a run for her money.

Although Powerset is not the first to push natural-language searching, with Ask Jeeves failing miserably in the 1990s and Hakia currently struggling to make inroads in the Internet search market, Pell believes his company’s technology will be able to fill in the holes that keyword searches leave behind.

He compares the problem of searching with keywords to trying to talk to a toddler with limited language skills.

“In one sense, you are happy you can talk to it at all, but you still really want it to grow up so you can hold a real conversation,” he says.

Not everyone expresses the same optimism. Industry analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research says the problem with natural-language searches lies not with faults in the technology’s algorithms, but with a computer’s inability to differentiate between variable meanings of the same word and discern the subtle nuances of language.

In a search, Li says, asking “What caused the collapse of Enron?” and “What caused the downfall of Enron?” will generally yield completely different search results even though the questions are essentially the same.

For other skeptics, whether Powerset can achieve its goal of revolutionizing the search engine sector will depend on the company’s ability to transform the mindset and ritual practices of Internet searchers. These critics argue that the majority of current searches are short, only a few words long, and that Internet users, increasingly demanding that all their online interactions happen in high-speed, may not easily make, or even want to make, the shift to more typing and longer search strings.

Danny Sullivan, a blogger for SearchEngineWatch.com, says Pell fails to provide a convincing argument for why today’s keyword search users would miraculously transition to the other side.

Internet users “aren’t using keywordese now because they somehow have been trained to do it,” Sullivan writes in a blog post. “No one from Google sat the searchers down and said ‘only two words, and don’t use conjunctions.’ People search however they want—and right now, they use only a few words” (“Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend,” Oct. 5, 2006).

Testing to Determine Powerset’s Potential

The natural-language debate aside, how successful the technology and the company will be remains to be seen. Powerset is rolling out its search engine gradually and will begin by analyzing feedback from the 16,000 people who have registered as users of its test site, Powerlabs. The temporary site is currently operating in a limited capacity, explains Liedtke, only indexing content from Wikipedia, the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia.

Powerset has set up Powerlabs to display, alongside its own results, the results returned by competitor sites like Google and Yahoo when given the same search questions. Powerlabs then requires users to choose which search engine’s results worked better for them before they can proceed with their next search.

With all the press over the past two years surrounding Powerset’s natural-language model, Google execs may be starting to feel the pressure of a competitor threatening to break Google’s steel grip on Internet searchdom. According to Liedtke, Google has been working on its own version of natural-language search technology since the end of 2005, pumping nearly $2.2 billion into research and development and beefing up its staff by thousands.

But executives at Powerset aren’t deterred by the competition or the criticism.

“Google is the king. … Their system does an amazing job, given what they have to go on” says Pell. “But we think they have plateaued.”

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Happy Birthday to :-)

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:13:00 GMT

To send e-mails or chat online without emoticons would be like listening to your computer’s artificial voice read an excerpt from the Harry Potter books—you may get the plot, but Harry’s spells are no longer frantic and Voldemort’s hissed threats no longer ooze evil.

This month, we celebrate September 19,1982, the birth date of the “smiley” emoticon, and all you chatting kings and queens out there may want to pay your respects to a man who revolutionized the way we communicate online with three simple keystrokes.

Scott E. Fahlman, a computer science research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, first introduced :-), or “the smiley,” on a departmental electronic bulletin 25 years ago. Fahlman considers his post to be the foundation of emoticons, otherwise known as emotional icons.

Scott Fahlman.

“I’ve never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence was in use before my original post, and I’ve never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did,” Fahlman writes on Smiley Lore :-), the university Web page he’s dedicated to the origins of the electronic smiley face. “But it’s always possible that someone else had the same idea—it’s a simple and obvious idea, after all.”

Following the Smiley Craze

Fahlman could never have imagined what would follow after his quick, impulsive post. As use of the smiley spread throughout his department, then from college to college, and finally across the country to the global e-space, writing in online formats changed forever.

“It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” Fahlman says in an Associated Press article (“:-) Turns 25,” Sep. 18, 2007). “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this started.”

The online bulletin with Fahlman’s post wasn’t saved and remained lost for years following the smiley explosion, Fahlman says on Smiley Lore. Neither Fahlman nor anyone else had any idea how popular that little sideways face made up entirely of punctuation would become, or that a two-sentence message would eventually be archived as a piece of communications history.

With the help of Mike Jones from Microsoft, an exhaustive search of Carnegie Mellon’s backup tapes uncovered Fahlman’s original post, which reads, “I propose the following character sequence for joke matters: :-). Read it sideways.”

Today, 25 years later, Internet users have thousands of emoticon options to choose from. Emoticons help to convey tone of voice or shades of meaning in online conversations that could otherwise be easily misconstrued without hearing a speaker’s intonation or seeing a facial expression to differentiate the excited from the angry, the serious from the sarcastic.

For example,

See you later ; )

means something completely different than

See you later

Smiling Strong for 25 Years

For some language purists, the use of emoticons cheapens the written word. They point to masters like Shakespeare and Faulkner, who crafted exquisitely descriptive phrases to paint vivid images and convey undertows of emotion, all without the use of emoticons.

But it’s hard to compare chat-speak to literature when online chatting and e-mail act more as stand-ins for speech than as writing.

“What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don’t have the voice,” says Clifford Nass, a Stanford University communications professor, in a quote in the AP article.

Whichever way you view it, the online world, from teen chatterboxes to forty-something CEOs, has embraced the smiley and other emoticons to such an extent that our words would now be lost in translation without them.

So the next time you stick out your virtual tongue or send a cyber wink, give a small thanks to the emoticon father himself, Steve E. Fahlman, for giving you the tools to do so.

Still a little lost when it comes to figuring out what that B-) and :--} in your e-mail mean? Check out this emoticon dictionary from Nerd Times.

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