How Facebook Built Natural Language Into Graph Search

Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook's Graph Search is an ambitious project: give users the ability to search through the social network's vast webs of data via natural-language queries. But that's much easier said—so to speak—than done. Although human beings think nothing of speaking in 'natural' language, a machine must not only learn all the grammatical building-blocks we take for granted—it needs to compensate for the quirks and errors that inevitably pop up in the course of speech. The Facebook team tasked with building Graph Search also knew that the alternate option, keyword-based search, wasn't a viable one. 'Keywords, which usually consist of nouns or proper nouns, can be nebulous in their intent,' Facebook engineering manager Xiao Li wrote in an April 29 posting on Facebook's blog. 'For example, "friends Facebook" can mean "friends on Facebook," "friends who work at Facebook Inc," or "friends who like Facebook the page."' That left the team with building a natural-language interface. The posting digs deep into the elements of the backend, including everything from 'parse trees' to a lexical analysis system."

Comments

The brightest minds of a generation

[Anonymous Coward]

And all they're doing is coming up with new ways to get you to look at ads.

Re:The brightest minds of a generation

[fph il quozientatore]

Don't forget all those bright minds trying to syphon truckloads of money out of meaningless microsecond virtual financial transations. This should give you a more thorough picture of how screwed up this world is.

Re:The brightest minds of a generation

[elloGov]

What about the bright minds coming up with new ways to kill people (military)?
Moral codes, ethics and philosophies are for the classroom, cash is what rules in the real world. The massive efforts of society to abstract our ill-doings (work) from our morals shouldn't be overlooked either.

Re:The brightest minds of a generation

[elloGov]

Civilization is an ongoing collective effort. Why do we whine about this? Next time you or a loved one who desperately needs the same bright minds to come up with remedy or a cure to a devastating disease, tell me why you don't whine.

Re:The brightest minds of a generation

[tyrione]

And all they're doing is coming up with new ways to get you to look at ads.

Whoever said they were the brightest minds? I can guarantee they aren't remotely the brightest of their generation. Not by a long shot.

Re:The brightest minds of a generation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not your fucking money.

Actually it is. Where do you think Hedge funds get their money form? And when the whole thing pisses itself whose Govt creates bailouts to fix the fuck-ups? that's right, it comes from us.

Say what you want, we are nothing if not generous about it but I wouldn't push the point too hard because confusing generously with idiocy would be your first mistake as history has shown with every civilisation prior to this one. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire

Re:The brightest minds of a generation

[PhamNguyen]

Capitalist economies always tend to work in strange ways. The first European explorers went in search of trivial luxury items like pepper. When you let people spend their money on precisely what they want, they often spend it in ways that don't seem to match up with what a rational person's wants and needs would seem to be.

Ads make money because people, for whatever reason, choose to click on ads. In the future, is is possible that people will prefer to pay a flat fee and see no ads? I think this is very likely, but we are not at the stage now, and so ads play a vital role in the economy, forming a kind of implicit micro-payment system.

Kind of like Google 10-15 years ago?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> give users the ability to search...data via natural-language queries

Kind of like Google and any other search engine that's caught on since. Cool story, bro. Can anyone explain to me why Facebook thought that its search function v 2.0 deserved its own name - and not a very sexy one at that? ("Graph search?" OK...that's Facebook for math nerds, right?)

Punctuation Facebook. Do you speak it?

[fahrbot-bot]

A Panda walks into a bar ...

• ... eats, shoots and leaves.
• ... eats shoots and leaves.

Very limited search capabilities

[adisakp]

You can't even search your past posts or friends posts for keywords or by a date range... and those seem like "easy" data searches.