Greetings all, Another school year is underway here in Duluth, with the usual flurry of activity. I am back to work teaching undergraduate NLP, and the graduate Computer Architecture class (which is focused on parallel computing with C/MPI on supercomputers at http://www.msi.umn.edu)
You may have seen the recent flurry of press releases, etc. regarding Cognition, a company that says they have created a semantic map of English and are able to assign meanings to words in order to better solve a wide range of business problems... http://www.cognition.com This should of course sound familiar to us - they have solved word sense disambiguation! :) Hurrah! I can catch up on some yard work and other household chores now. Well, I don't know if they have actually solved it, but they do offer a rather nice interface that disambiguates words in queries you give it....they do this in three domain (legal, health, and wikipedia) - the choice of narrow (and profitable) domains is of course shrewd from a business and NLP point of view... Anyway, as a business they don't reveal much of their underlying technology, but it's rather fun to play with all the same. I went to their Wikipedia search ... http://wikipedia.cognition.com and entered... "Who founded the United States Treasury Department?" ...they assigned senses to "found" "United States" and "Treasury Department" and in fact come up with reasonable senses (although the search results don't really answer the question...it's a tricky question though, I think, since it was established by an act of Congress, making the Congress the founders I suppose...Alexander Hamilton was the first secretary of the Treasury, so one might consider him to be the founder as well ) They have pulldown menus that let you change the meanings of the words assigned and thereby adjust the results, so they might give just enough information here to allow for a little reverse engineering of what they must be doing.... Anyway, this is a nice example of word sense disambiguation making a foray into the real world, and it will be interesting to see what comes of this, especially since Varada and I are now actively working on all words sense disambiguation with WordNet::SenseRelate::AllWords.... We have a web interface too, although not quite as fancy. :) http://charango.d.umn.edu/allwords/allwords.html I have been having some fun comparing our results to theirs... our results for my example above aren't bad...they have made their results sort of hard to cut and paste, so I'll leave that to you to experiment with if you like... ---------------------- who found#v#2 the united_states_treasury#n#1 department#n#1 who : stopword found#v#2 : set up or lay the groundwork for; "establish a new department" the : not in WordNet united_states_treasury#n#1 : the federal department that collects revenue and administers federal finances; the Treasury Department was created in 1789 department#n#1 : a specialized division of a large organization; "you'll find it in the hardware department"; "she got a job in the historical section of the Treasury" ---------------------- Enjoy, Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
