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The Future of Google Search and Natural Language Queries
eldavojohn writes "You might know the name Peter Norvig from the classic big green book, 'AI: A Modern Approach.' He's been working for Google since 2001 as Director of Search Quality. An interview with Norvig at MIT's Technology Review has a few interesting insights into the 'search mindset' at the company. It's kind of surprising that he claims they have no intent to allow natural questions. Instead he posits, 'We think what's important about natural language is the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for. But we don't think it's a big advance to be able to type something as a question as opposed to keywords ... understanding how words go together is important ... That's a natural-language aspect that we're focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we're not concentrating on the sentence.'"
I would find the drop-down suggestions a lot more useful if I could read more than the first two words. As I type in, for example "Chicago dog boarding" all I see is a list of "Chicago do... " I'm sure there must be a way to make the search space take up more of the toolbar (I don't really need that much room in the URL space, since most URLs that long are nonsense), but I don't know how and I don't really want my browser window to be the width of my screen.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
A phrase is part of a sentence. WP
text-to-speech or speech-to-text is also useless (unless your blind/ deaf/ driving a car)
the idea of interacting with a computer like a human is an artificial hangover from being introduced to the computer the first time. after using it for awhile, you realize that ineracting with a computer, in small limited ways, like searching information, is easier NOT using natural language
for the very simple reason that it takes more thought, and more typing to interact naturally. it is easier to train a human to interact with a computer than it is to train a computer to interact with a human. and for the human, it is more rewarding, because the human realizes he doesn't need to exert so much effort
"what is the capital of france?"
versus
"france capital"
if you were to shout "france capital" at someone, it would be rude and confusing. but for a computer, it's actually superior
it is the conservation of communication effort at work here that wins out over natural language in computer interaction
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Typing "What is the capital of France?" won't get you better results than typing "capital of France." ... Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we're not concentrating on the sentence. We think it's important to get the right results rather than change the interface.
This misses situations like searching for "That sf-short-story were the crew of the visiting spaceship is given a dog as a present" in which googling failed, at least for me, or, more technically, when you have absolutely no idea about what the relevant terms within the outcome might be. In short, if you have a real question.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
"That's easy! The capital of France is 'F'."
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Any problem can be made unsolvable if there are enough meetings made to discuss it.
Not at all. I do that kind of question in Google all the time.
Googling for "Why did World War I start" brings up, as the first result, an article titled "The Causes of World War I".
Followed by a few million more hits if that one isn't good enough.
And the question "What does a duck eat" gets many hits as well. The first one has, in the summary:
Ducks in the wild eat a variety of plants, insects, and native foods that will differ from...
I know it's just picking out keywords from the query and matching them to the sites, not trying to parse the natural language, but it works pretty damn well.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
I think Norvig's lying. Google may not be pursuing linguistic structure above the phrase level in searches, but I'd bet a donut they're working their asses off trying to analyze crawled docs linguistically. To get relevance, they need to extract what a document is about. That implies sentence-level syntax analysis, which is input to sentence-level semantics, which is input to paragraph-level semantics, which is input to "pragmatic" analysis. I think what he's not saying is that the place the linguistic research dollars are going is elsewhere than parsing "Where is Paris?"