Google and the Author’s Guild establish an ASCAP for books
Most of the coverage of the Google/Authors Guild settlement today seems to focus on Google’s side of things. But I think the authors’ side is much more important. This deal paves the way for traditional publishers to become quaint and useless — and not a moment too soon.
Below are some quotes — fair use!! 
— from the Authors Guild official statement on the deal (emphasis mine): Read more
| Categories: Google, Search engines, Social software and online media, Specialized search | Leave a Comment |
Maybe text mining SHOULD be playing a bigger role in data warehousing
When I chatted last week with David Bean of Attensity, I commented to him on a paradox:
Many people think text information is important to analyze, but even so data warehouses don’t seem to wind up holding very much of it.
| Categories: Attensity, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, Sentiment analysis, Text mining | 5 Comments |
Attensity update
I had a brief chat with the Attensity guys at their Teradata Partners Conference booth – mainly CTO David Bean, although he did buck one question to sales chief Jeff Johnson. The business trends story remained the same as it was in June: The sweet spot for new sales remains Voice of the Customer/Voice of the Market, while on-premise/SaaS new-name accounts are split around 50-50 (by number, not revenue).
David’s thoughts as to why the SaaS share isn’t even higher – as it seems to be for Clarabridge* – centered on the point that some customers want to blend internal and external data, and may not want to ship the internal part out to a SaaS provider. Besides, if it’s tabular data, I suspect Attensity isn’t the right place to ship it anyway.
*Speaking of Clarabridge, CEO Sid Banerjee recently posted a thoughtful company update in this comment thread.
When I challenged him on ease of use, David said that Attensity is readying a Microstrategy-based offering, which is obviously meant to compete with Clarabridge and any of its perceived advantages head-on.
| Categories: Application areas, Attensity, Clarabridge, Competitive intelligence, Software as a Service (SaaS), Text mining, Text mining SaaS, Voice of the Customer | 1 Comment |
Lynda Moulton prefers enterprise search products that get up and running quickly
Lynda Moulton, to put it mildly, disagrees with the Gartner Magic Quadrant analysis of enterprise search. Her preferred approach is captured in:
Coveo, Exalead, ISYS, Recommind, Vivisimo, and X1 are a few of a select group that are marking a mark in their respective niches, as products ready for action with a short implementation cycle (weeks or months not years).
By way of contrast, Lynda opines:
Autonomy and Endeca continue to bring value to very large projects in large companies but are not plug-and-play solutions, by any means. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft offer search solutions of a very different type with a heavy vendor or third-party service requirement. Google Search Appliance has a much larger installed base than any of these but needs serious tuning and customization to make it suitable to enterprise needs.
In particular, her views about FAST (now Microsoft) are scathing.
| Categories: Coveo, Enterprise search, FAST, Microsoft, Search engines | Leave a Comment |
More on Languageware
Marie Wallace of IBM wrote back in response to my post on Languageware. In particular, it seems I got the Languageware/UIMA relationship wrong. Marie’s email was long and thoughtful enough that, rather than just pointing her at the comment thread, I asked for permission to repost it. Here goes:
Thanks for your mention to LanguageWare on your blog, albeit a skeptical one
I totally understand your scepticism as there is so much talk about text analytics these days and everyone believes they have solved the problem. I guess I can only hope that our approach will indeed prove to be different and offers some new and interesting perspectives.
The key differentiation in our approach is that we have completely decoupled the language model from the code that runs the analysis. This has been generalized to a set of data-driven algorithms that apply across many languages so that you can have an approach that makes the solution hugely and rapidly customizable (without having to change code). It is this flexibility that we believe is core to realizing multi-lingual and multi-domain text analysis applications in a real-word scenario. This customization environment is available for download from Alphaworks, http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/lrw, and we would love to get feedback from your community.
On your point about performance, we actually consider UIMA one of our greatest performance optimizations and core to our design. The point about one-pass is that we never go back over the same piece of text twice at the same “level” and take a very careful approach when defining our UIMA Annotators. Certain layers of language processing just don’t make sense to split up due to their interconnectedness and therefore we create our UIMA annotators according to where they sit in the overall processing layers. That’s the key point.
Anyway those are my thoughts, and thanks again for the mention. It’s really great to see these topics being discussed in an open and challenging forum.
Languageware — IBM takes another try at natural language processing
Marie Wallace of IBM wrote in from Ireland to call my attention to Languageware, IBM’s latest try at natural language processing (NLP). Obviously, IBM has been down this road multiple times before, from ViaVoice (dictation software that got beat out by Dragon NaturallySpeaking) to Penelope (research project that seemingly went on for as long as Odysseus was away from Ithaca — rumor has it that the principals eventually decamped to Microsoft, and continued to not produce commercial technology there). Read more
Worst search UI ever
On the whole, the Barack Obama campaign has been very internet-savvy. Maybe their web site JohnMcCainRecord.com is yet another example of same. But to my eyes, it has such an appallingly bad search interface that people going to the site are apt to be annoyed. To wit:
- There a huge search box in the center of the screen.
- All the search box ever does is take you to one of the 13 categories listed right below it.
- Usually, it doesn’t even do that. Instead, it just fails. For example, I entered terrorism and hit “Go”, and got no response. Ditto nuclear energy.
- When it does give you an answer, it’s apt not to be what you were looking for. For example, entering Iran takes you to the Foreign Policy page, which contains nothing about Iran.
And then, of course, there’s the funny stuff. For example, if you search on foo, you are taken to Rural Issues.
In general terms, I like the idea of the site. But absent some serious changes, JohnMcCainRecord.com should not have a search interface.
Edit: More here in my post on The Obama campaign’s Search Engine to Nowhere
| Categories: Search engines, Structured search | Leave a Comment |
