Intellectual Defenestration

Intelligent Searching

Robert Cringely highlights MeaningMaster, a company that claims to be able have a search technology that can actually search based on the meaning of words, rather than just appearance of keywords.

MeaningMaster is the brainchild of Kathleen Dahlgren, a computational linguistics PhD who has spent most of her career building a lexicon of the English language. This lexicon is a computer dictionary that is purported to understand the meanings of more than 200,000 English words IN CONTEXT ...

"We model the way people interpret the meanings of a word -- through context," says Ms. Dahlgren, who is today CEO of MeaningMaster. "We search on meaning by using grammar and structure and semantics. Every word has associated with it a set of beliefs." In order to unlock that set of beliefs, MeaningMaster is hand-coded, a process that took 175 man- and woman-years.

I've been wondering if something like this would ever be feasible since reading Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines a couple of years back, where he argues that there needs to be a way to have a computer format for knowledge, rather than just data. MeaningMaster seems to be a step in that direction.

I'm still skeptical as to whether or not a search engine will be able to give a decent response to "show me all critiques of Higher Criticism from the standpoint of Ancient Near Eastern literary structures" (Google's first hit back was something on astrology). I'm willing to admit that somebody may someday, given enough rooms of computers or new advances in molecular computing, be able to give a pretty decent response. But it's noteworthy that MeaningMaster is relying so much on what appears to be hard-coded rules, rather than having developed some new AI system.

April 26, 2004 04:08 PM