Xerox Gives Search Engine Human Brain
June
,2007: Well, human-like anyway. The company is jumping into the search
market, however, it is leaving plain old keyword search behind,
replacing it with a new semantics based engine that it claims will help
researchers find information, no matter how obscure, more rapidly than
ever before.Called FactSpotter, the search technology was developed to
work contextually, analyse the meaning of words and accept searches
phrased in everyday language. For example, if searching for documents
that reference Angelina Jolie, it will also return results where the
pronoun “she” is used instead of Jolie’s full name.
While this
indeed sounds helpful right off the bat, the technology actually breaks
quite significant ground. Xerox claims this capability enables the
engine to “comb through almost any document regardless of the language,
location, format or type; take advantage of the way humans think, speak
and ask questions; and discriminate the results highlighting just a
handful of relevant answers instead of returning thousands of unrelated
responses.””Our advanced search engine goes beyond today’s typical
‘keyword’ search or current data-mining programs, which typically end
up searching only 40 percent of all the documents that are relevant
because the keywords are too limiting,” said Frédérique Segond, manager
of parsing and semantics research at XRCE.”Xerox’s tool is more
accurate because it delves into documents, extracting the concepts and
the relationships among them. By ‘understanding’ the context, it
returns the right information to the searcher, and it even highlights
the exact location of the answer within the document.”FactSpotter also
beats traditional keyword search at its own game by returning specific
portions of a search document relevant to the query, it takes into
account the context of the entire document instead of just a cluster of
nearby words, and also recognises abstract concepts, like “people” or
“building,” and will retrieve all the words that fit within that
category.Developed in Grenoble, France, by researchers at the Xerox
Research Centre Europe, Xerox says the technology makes it easy to
retrieve information from massive data bases in legal cases, fraud
detection, drug discovery, risk management and much more.