Comments on: Structured Search Is On The Table

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:41:42 +0000

Not that Google Squared is fully baked, but I get lot more than two answers when query oracle acquisitions. BEA Systems, Demantra, Retek, TimesTen, Portal Software, Oblix, LODESTAR Corporation, Stellent, and 360Commerce look right to me. Network computer and Oracle Corporations are false positives--and Sun Microsystems, which actually isn't an Oracle acquisition yet, triggered the latter. So there's work to do, for sure. But, as the FAQ says, "Google Squared is still in an experimental phase at this point, so you might encounter some hiccups while using it." There are paid services in this domain, e.g., those listed Dow Jones's Taxonomy Warehouse. But it seems that a number of folks are competing in the world of free. That means a lot of price pressure--if you're going to charge, you really have to knock it out of the park, and to hope that free doesn't catch up on quality.

By: Pankaj Mehra

Pankaj Mehra — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:21:04 +0000

The query Oracle acquisitions on Google Squared brings back a whopping two answers! Some things are worth paying for so you can get good qality answers. Room for a half-decent paid service here.

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Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:20:29 +0000

[...] Structured Search Is On The Table – the Noisy Channel [...]

By: Christopher

Christopher — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:05:34 +0000

@Laurent,

This is an example of where using more syntactic/semantic data as context rather than just c0-located n-gams can really improve recall.

I also agree with Daniel that using corpus analysis to improve on document-level named entity detection is a great tool in the arsenal.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:50:46 +0000

Laurent, my experience is comparable, and others I've talked to say similar things. The way I've improved on document-level annotation has been by leveraging corpus analysis, e.g., in the "Supporting Exploratory Search for the ACM Digital Library" work presented at HCIR 2008. We had similar success applying corpus analysis to improve on document-level named entity detection, which, in my experience, offers a similar challenge of low recall.

By: Laurent

Laurent — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:05:44 +0000

I've tried their online demo at http://viewer.opencalais.com/ but it doesn't pick up the locations (most often just state level, not city) or dates and times. However, it's good at identifying people and sometimes main topics (e.g. environment). For twillage.com, I'd like to be able to query "conferences in Europe in December" or "happy hours near Palo Alto this friday". What about you?

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:43:39 +0000

Have you tried experimenting with Open Calais? It's not perfect, but it's free if you don't bang on it too hard.

By: Laurent

Laurent — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:29:49 +0000

If the tweet doesn’t contain neither a date, time, or placename, but a link, we could follow it and try to figure out if the landing page describes an event and get the place, date and time from there. Maybe you could help

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:22:02 +0000

Nicely done. Not clear that you can do much more with 140-character tweets.

By: Laurent

Laurent — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:12:53 +0000

automatically, but it’s simply keyword-based. We currently monitor about 100 keywords using twitter’s streaming API (track). And use our own regular expressions to detect dates/times and then use another service for placename extraction.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:58:50 +0000

Interesting--definitely better precision than http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands=concert&near=San+Francisco&within=15&units=mi. Do you implement event detection through humans or analyzing the text of tweets?

By: Laurent

Laurent — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:40:07 +0000

At http://www.twillage.com we also do structured search. We try to detect event-related tweets from twitter, extract placenames, dates and then let people search for what's happening in a specific town. e.g. http://www.twillage.com/search?q=concert+san+francisco

By: Christopher

Christopher — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:41:45 +0000

LOL,

Yes, many ways to say the same thing. I’m following the InfoChimps closely, they and Freebase seem to be a significant step ahead of the others.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:35:18 +0000

Infochimps is "the world's largest open platform for data". Freebase is "an open database of the world’s information". Factual is "a platform where anyone can share and mash open data on any subject". Will the real Slim Shady please stand up? :-) But point taken--I'll check it out.

By: christopher

christopher — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:23:01 +0000

Hi Daniel,

Take a look at what the @infochimps are doing. They have a super open data repository and a monetization strategy.