Comments on: A New Kind of Marketing (NKM)

By: The Wolfram Cometh | The Noisy Channel

The Wolfram Cometh | The Noisy Channel — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:33:57 +0000

[...] The initial marketing and buzz offered a level of hyperbole comparable to the hype that surrounded the publication of Wolfram’s New Kind of Science (appreciated NKS by Wolfram and fans) seven years ago. Regulars may recall that I responded by calling it “A New Kind of Marketing (NKM)“. [...]

By: Wolfram Talks About Wolfram Alpha | The Noisy Channel

Wolfram Talks About Wolfram Alpha | The Noisy Channel — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:31:01 +0000

[...] from a software service. Maybe I underestimate him. Needless to say, I’m a lot closer to my initial skepticism [...]

By: Booster

Booster — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:30:02 +0000

Looks like Language Computer is finally going public with QnA: check out Swingly.com, whose CEO is the same as the CEO of Language Computer.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:50:57 +0000

On the question of whether ‘factoid’ Q&A can make a business, its appears that the SMS services such as texperts or aqa are turning a profit even with the overhead of having human beings answer the questions. Clearly some people have the need for this.

By: erica

erica — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:46:43 +0000

(or a spaceship)

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 03:01:07 +0000

Erica, I’m with you on this one; I’d be impressed with a robust question answering system. The Google / Wikipedia / rest-of-web combo gets me pretty far, but certainly there are a lot of questions it can’t answer because there aren’t sentences on the web that answer them. But I’m not holding my breath that Wolfram Alpha (which sounds like an Ayn Rand protagonist, no?) will do any better, other than perhaps on a carefully tuned subset.

By: erica

erica — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:49:57 +0000

with regards to comments that this sort of thing wouldn’t really be useful: really? I can think of plenty of times when I’ve wanted to know the answer to some fairly specific factoid-type question, and either had to figure out how exactly to phrase it, or wade through Wikipedia articles or other web pages to find the answer. For example:
‘what is a word that means “too wordy”?’
‘what is the least expensive way to get from Boston to New York?’
‘which grad schools in North America have programs in underwater basket weaving?’
‘how do I use Emacs to make a sandwich?’
‘when is CKY parsing better than Earley parsing?’
‘is it possible to perform a Fourier transform using some duct tape and my left pinky toe?’
and plenty of other sorts of random but specific (and less absurd) questions that are probably better examples that I just can’t think of right now — does Wolfram claim that his system will be able to answer questions like these? I think it would be super cool and quite useful if they got this to work. I am pretty skeptical about what can be done in two months’ time, but nevertheless I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:49:19 +0000

That’s awesome! Someday I hope I have access to that kind of subliminal product placement. Readers in the media industry, please take note.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:45:01 +0000

Interesting side note to this…

Wolfram’s Mathematica team consults on a TV show called Numbers, essentially a drama where a match genius professor helps his FBI brother solve crimes using math.

Last week’s episode featured a computer which could pass the Turing Test, essentially coming up with the best answer to any unbounded question…

Now that’s a new kind of marketing. Coincidence? I think not.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:04:13 +0000

I hope he manages to pull off an unbounded QA system but I am highly skeptical.

As Neal says “Do we really think that Wolfram is going to be able to beat people who have been working on QA for a decade?”

By: Neal Richter

Neal Richter — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:00:09 +0000

Even if this is just QA, we’ve seen that fail before .. even when in my opinion it’s super useful for CRM applications.

I hope that the True Knowledge (http://www.trueknowledge.com/) people will do it right, they looks like they are working hard, raising a bit of capital, and shipping code/data frequently. These attributes and not hype are better predictors of success.

For all their hard work Harabagiu, Moldovan et al. were not able to execute a large commercial launch of the QA platform that has been winning the TREC QA track for approx 10 years. See Language Computer Corp and Lymba Corp. Either they tried to get big VC money and failed or they are smart enough to make a modestly successful business as an OEMer of QA software.

Do we really think that Wolfram is going to be able to beat people who have been working on QA for a decade?

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:58:15 +0000

There’s a peak of interest already. What I want is a peek at the system. And I agree, he’ll have to show that his system can solve real problems that existing ones can’t–at least if he wants my vote for greatness.

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:30:55 +0000

Even if he completely nails it with this QA system — approaching perfection in answering general knowledge factual questions — would that really be the next big thing in “search”? What is the real utility of a system like this?

IMO, factoid QA is a good place to demo NLP or knowledge representation technologies, but there are very few real use cases for a system like this. Factoid answers need context to be really useful beyond just filling out crossword puzzles, taking tests or answering trivia questions.

My prediction — when it launches, there’ll be an initial peak of interest when people see that its possible to perform general factoid QA, but that’ll quickly fade when everyone realizes that a factoid QA system doesn’t solve any real problem.