Language recognition

Analysis of technologies that recognize and/or respond directly to spoken or written human languages.

January 17, 2008

Dr. Doolittle in silicon

The Reg passes along a Reuters story that Hungarian scientists have built a system to automatically understand canine vocalizations. I’d like to say it’s a woof-to-Magyar translator, but apparently all it does is recognize the doggies’ emotional states. The story reports that the system has 43% accuracy, vs. 40% for humans.

I must confess, however, to being somewhat puzzled about how they measure success. Does the pooch fill out a survey form afterwards? Do they conclude that the beast wasn’t angry if the experimenter doesn’t get bitten?

I need to know a bit more about the research protocol before I know what to think about this.

EDIT: The CBC has a little more detail. The underlying research paper is appearing in Animal Cognition.

December 2, 2007

So what’s the state of speech recognition and dictation software?

Linda asked me about the state of desktop dictation technology. In particular, she asked me whether there was much difference between the latest version and earlier, cheaper ones. My knowledge of the area is out of date, so I thought I’d throw both the specific question and the broader subject of speech recognition out there for general discussion.

Here’s much of what I know or believe about speech recognition:

November 30, 2007

NEC simplifies the voice translation problem

NEC announced research-level technology that lets a cellphone automatically translate from Japanese into English. The key idea is that they are generating text output, not speech, which lets them sidestep pesky problems about accuracy. I.e. (emphasis mine):

One second after the phone hears speech in Japanese, the cellphone with the new technology shows the text on the screen. One second later, an English version appears. …

“We would need to study how to recognise [sic] voices on the phone precisely. Another problem would be how the person on the other side of the line could know if his or her words are being translated correctly,” he said.

Read more

July 16, 2007

Progress EasyAsk

I dropped by Progress a couple of weeks ago for back-to-back briefings on Apama and EasyAsk. EasyAsk is Larry Harris’ second try at natural language query, after the Intellect product fell by the wayside at Trinzic, the company Artificial Intelligence Corporation grew into.* After a friendly divorce from the company he founded, if my memory is correct, Larry was able to build EasyAsk very directly on top of the Intellect intellectual property.

*Other company or product names in the mix at various times include AI Corp and English Wizard. Not inappropriately, it seems that Larry has quite an affinity for synonyms …

EasyAsk is still a small business. The bulk is still in enterprise query, but new activity is concentrated on e-commerce applications. While Larry thinks that they’ve solved most of the other technical problems that have bedeviled him over the past three decades, the system still takes too long to implement. Read more

February 28, 2007

SAP’s “search” strategy isn’t about search

I caught up with Dennis Moore today to talk about SAP’s search strategy. And the biggest thing I learned was – it’s not about the search. Rather, it’s about a general interface, of which search and natural language just happen to be major parts.

Dennis didn’t actually give me a lot of details, at least not ones he’s eager to see published at this time. That said, SAP has long had a bare-bones search engine TREX. (TREX was also adapted to create the columnar relational data manager BI Accelerator.) But we didn’t talk about TREX enhancements at all, and I’m guessing there haven’t really been many. Rather, SAP’s focus seems to be on:

A. Finding business objects.

B. Helping users do things with them.

Read more

February 15, 2007

InQuira’s and Mercado’s approaches to structured search

InQuira and Mercado both have broadened their marketing pitches beyond their traditional specialties of structured search for e-commerce. Even so, it’s well worth talking about those search technologies, which offer features and precision that you just don’t get from generic search engines. There’s a lot going on in these rather cool products.

In broad outline, Mercado and InQuira each combine three basic search approaches:

Of the two, InQuira seems to have the more sophisticated ontology. Indeed, the not-wholly-absurd claim is that InQuira does natural-language processing (NLP). Both vendors incorporate user information in deciding which search results to show, in ways that may be harbingers of what generic search engines like Google and Yahoo will do down the road. Read more

September 1, 2006

Why the BI vendors are integrating with Google OneBox

I’m hearing the same thing from multiple BI vendors, with SAS being the most recent and freshest in my mind — customers want them to “integrate” with Google OneBox. Why Google rather than a better enterprise search technology, such as FAST’s? So far as I’ve figured out, these are the reasons, in no particular order:

The last point, I think, is the most interesting. Lots of people think text search is and/or should be the dominant UI of the future. Now, I’ve been a big fan of natural language command line interfaces ever since the days of Intellect and Lotus HAL. But judging by the market success of those products — or for that matter of voice command/control — I was in a very small minority. Maybe the even simpler search interface — words jumbled together without grammatical structure — will win out instead.

Who knows? Progress is a funny thing. Maybe the ultimate UI will be one that responds well to grunts, hand gestures, and stick-figure drawings. We could call it NeanderHAL, but that would wrong …

June 9, 2006

That great linguist, Groucho Marx, and other stories

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably familiar with a saying that illustrates some of the basic challenges of disambiguation:

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

But did you know who said it first? I didn’t until recently. Read more

December 11, 2005

The text technologies market 3: Here’s what’s missing

The text technologies market should be booming, but actually is in disarray. How, then, do I think it should be fixed? I think the key problem can be summed up like this:

There’s a product category that is a key component of the technology, without which it won’t live up to nearly its potential benefits. But there’s widespread and justified concern over its commercial viability. Hence, the industry cowers in niches where it can indeed eke out some success despite products that fall far short of their true potential.

The product category I have in mind, for lack of a better name, is an ontology management system. No category of text technology can work really well without some kind of semantic understanding. Automated clustering is very important for informing this understanding in a cost-effective way, but such clustering is not a complete solution – hence the relative disappointment of Autonomy, the utter failure of Excite, and so on. Rather, there has to be some kind of concept ontology that can be use to inform disambiguation. It doesn’t matter whether the application category is search, text mining, command/control, or anything else; semantic disambiguation is almost always necessary for the most precise, user-satisfying results. Maybe it’s enough to have a thesaurus – i.e., a list of synonyms. Maybe it’s enough to define “concepts” by simple vectors of word likelihoods. But you have to have something, or your search results will be cluttered, your information retrieval won’t fetch what you want it to, your text mining will have wide error bars, and your free-speech understanders will come back with a whole lot of “I’m sorry; I didn’t understand that.”

This isn’t just my opinion. Look at Inquira. Look at text mining products from SPSS and many others. Look at Oracle’s original text indexing technology and also at its Triplehop acquisition. For that matter, look at Sybase’s AnswersAnywhere, in which the concept network is really just an object model, in the full running-application sense of “object.” Comparing text to some sort of thesaurus or concept representation is central to enterprise text technology applications (and increasingly to web search as well).

Could one “ontology management system,” whatever that is, service multiple types of text applications? Of course it could. The ideal ontology would consist mainly of four aspects:

1. A conceptual part that’s language-independent.
2. A general language-dependent part.
3. A sensitivity to different kinds of text – language is used differently when spoken, for instance, than it is in edited newspaper articles.
4. An enterprise-specific part. For example, a company has product names, and competitors with product names, and those names have abbreviations, and so on.

Relatively little of that is application-specific; for any given enterprise, a single ontology should meet most or all of its application needs.

Coming up: The legitimate barriers to the creation of an ontology management system market, and ideas about how to overcome them.

December 9, 2005

The text technologies market 2: It’s actually in disarray

The text technologies market should be huge and thriving. Actually, however, it’s in disarray. Multiple generations of enterprise search vendors have floundered, with the Autonomy/Verity merger being basically a combination of the weak. The RDBMS vendors came up with decent hybrid tabular/text offerings, and almost nobody cared. (Admittedly, part of the reason for that is that the best offering was Oracle’s, and Oracle almost always screws up its ancillary businesses. Email searchability has been ridiculously bad since — well, since the invention of email. And speech technology has floundered for decades, with most of the survivors now rolled into the new version of Nuance.

Commercial text mining is indeed booming, but not to an extent that erases the overall picture of gloom. It’s at most a several hundred million dollar business, and one that’s highly fragmented. For example, at a conference on IT in life sciences not that long ago, two things became evident. First, the text mining companies were making huge, intellectually fascinating, life-saving contributions to medical research. Second, more than ten vendors were divvying up what was only around a $10 million market.

If text technology is going to achieve the prominence and prosperity it deserves, something dramatic has to change.

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