XEROX GIVES SEARCH ENGINE HUMAN BRAIN

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.