They apparently use Ruby for their front end and Rails for their internal tools. I am a little curious as to how that turned out. I haven't seen any blog posts recently.
With all due respect, I doubt if they have the brain power to create something to dethrone Google. Google has some incredible people working on search.
A couple of years ago, when the Yahoo vs Google war for search dominance was at its peak, I asked a friend of mine who worked at Yahoo, "Who is your equivalent of Peter Norvig? " (who was then Google's Director of Search Quality - today he is Director of Research) and after some hemming and hawing he told me " well, we don't have anyone like that but then we are a media company, not a search company.("We are a media company" was the mantra Terry Semel was repeating at Yahoo then) and I knew then that Yahoo would never beat Google (in search).
I wonder what the Powerset guys tell themselves? I find the internal mythologies of companies fascinating.
From what I understand from the presentation given at the Singularity Summit by Barney Pell, Powerset's NLP technology was developed over 30 years by Xerox. (You can listen to the audio at http://www.singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2007 ). That could conceivably give them an edge, or at least a short term lead. :o)
Honestly it may be somewhat heretical to say it, but I doubt very seriously that an old Xerox patent really has so much relevance.
The academic community has been working with semantic indexes for quite some time. I know many of those involved. The real question is whether they have developed something fundamental recently.
As for performance, yes perhaps they have some innovations. But with NLIs its usability that matters the most in the end.
At a more technical level I think the question is how expressive/consistent is the logical form they are mapping too. If they have developed a parser that maps to an LF that can lead to actual inferece then that would mean something.
But then they need an open domain strategy to actually reason over such expressions in a meaningful/useful way. We will see.
To me, the idea that they went back to a thirty-year old algorithm is the one credible thing in the whole story. Almost nobody reads old papers in computer science.
Somewhere out there in the libraries are the computing equivalents of transparent aluminum, but you can barely get researchers to look at this stuff, let alone Joe Javahead.
Good point. And actually from another post in this thread it sounds like it is more than a patent/algorithm, it is a painstakingly built system. So yes perhap they have something. We will see.
As for you comment about researchers not being aware of the literature, I agree 100%. I review from time to time and the number of papers that are reinventing the wheel (and doing so in a sloppy way) is staggering. I think the problem is that too many researchers are just concerned with building up as many papers as possible to beat the tenure clock and/or to impress their rivals.
Evaluators somehow need to stop bean counting publications as a measure of merit. The problem they face is they don't know how else to evaluate...
Not to start an argument (you(==bsg) make a good point), but one should be very careful in judging a technology as an "edge providing" one just because it comes from PARC.
PARC has certainly done brilliant,pioneering work in many areas. What most people miss is that PARC had many deadwood/unsuccessful projects (and people and worthless papers ) in its time.
I know nothing about what exactly PARC licensed to Powerset, but without more data, I wouldn't automatically assume that it provides an edge.
I was thinking principally of the sheer number of man years that have been put into the system. I know that's not a very accurate yardstick, hence the smiley. :o)
My understanding is that the technology Powerset got from Xerox is a production quality, multiple language parsing system with a language-independent core, with the long development time being due to the engineers being allowed to work on the problem until they had solved it to their satisfaction.
Of course, all of my information comes from the above-mentioned presentation, so a large pinch of salt is almost certainly required. :o)
With all due respect, I doubt if they have the brain power to create something to dethrone Google. Google has some incredible people working on search.
A couple of years ago, when the Yahoo vs Google war for search dominance was at its peak, I asked a friend of mine who worked at Yahoo, "Who is your equivalent of Peter Norvig? " (who was then Google's Director of Search Quality - today he is Director of Research) and after some hemming and hawing he told me " well, we don't have anyone like that but then we are a media company, not a search company.("We are a media company" was the mantra Terry Semel was repeating at Yahoo then) and I knew then that Yahoo would never beat Google (in search).
I wonder what the Powerset guys tell themselves? I find the internal mythologies of companies fascinating.