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From what I understand from the presentation given at the Singularity Summit by Barney Pell, Powerset's NLP technology was developed over 30 years by Xerox. (Yo

by bsg 19y ago

From what I understand from the presentation given at the Singularity Summit by Barney Pell, Powerset's NLP technology was developed over 30 years by Xerox. (You can listen to the audio at http://www.singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2007 http://www.singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2007 ). That could conceivably give them an edge, or at least a short term lead. :o)

plinkplonk 19y ago
Not to start an argument (you(==bsg) make a good point), but one should be very careful in judging a technology as an "edge providing" one just because it comes from PARC. PARC has certainly done brilliant,pioneering work in many areas. What most people miss is that PARC had many deadwood/unsuccessful projects (and people and worthless papers ) in its time. I know nothing about what exactly PARC licensed to Powerset, but without more data, I wouldn't automatically assume that it provides an edge.
- bsg 19y ago
  I was thinking principally of the sheer number of man years that have been put into the system. I know that's not a very accurate yardstick, hence the smiley. :o) My understanding is that the technology Powerset got from Xerox is a production quality, multiple language parsing system with a language-independent core, with the long development time being due to the engineers being allowed to work on the problem until they had solved it to their satisfaction. Of course, all of my information comes from the above-mentioned presentation, so a large pinch of salt is almost certainly required. :o)
anaphoric 19y ago
Honestly it may be somewhat heretical to say it, but I doubt very seriously that an old Xerox patent really has so much relevance. The academic community has been working with semantic indexes for quite some time. I know many of those involved. The real question is whether they have developed something fundamental recently. As for performance, yes perhaps they have some innovations. But with NLIs its usability that matters the most in the end. At a more technical level I think the question is how expressive/consistent is the logical form they are mapping too. If they have developed a parser that maps to an LF that can lead to actual inferece then that would mean something. But then they need an open domain strategy to actually reason over such expressions in a meaningful/useful way. We will see.
- neilk 19y ago
  To me, the idea that they went back to a thirty-year old algorithm is the one credible thing in the whole story. Almost nobody reads old papers in computer science. Somewhere out there in the libraries are the computing equivalents of transparent aluminum, but you can barely get researchers to look at this stuff, let alone Joe Javahead.
  - anaphoric 19y ago
    Good point. And actually from another post in this thread it sounds like it is more than a patent/algorithm, it is a painstakingly built system. So yes perhap they have something. We will see. As for you comment about researchers not being aware of the literature, I agree 100%. I review from time to time and the number of papers that are reinventing the wheel (and doing so in a sloppy way) is staggering. I think the problem is that too many researchers are just concerned with building up as many papers as possible to beat the tenure clock and/or to impress their rivals. Evaluators somehow need to stop bean counting publications as a measure of merit. The problem they face is they don't know how else to evaluate...
  - corentin 19y ago
    I'm sure that many interesting software gems were abandoned because the hardware was not powerful enough at the time. Plus, when computer science was new, a lot of crazy stuff was being researched; nowadays the academic research seems pretty close-minded.

by bsg 19y ago

plinkplonk 19y ago

Not to start an argument (you(==bsg) make a good point), but one should be very careful in judging a technology as an "edge providing" one just because it comes from PARC. PARC has certainly done brilliant,pioneering work in many areas. What most people miss is that PARC had many deadwood/unsuccessful projects (and people and worthless papers ) in its time. I know nothing about what exactly PARC licensed to Powerset, but without more data, I wouldn't automatically assume that it provides an edge.

bsg 19y ago
I was thinking principally of the sheer number of man years that have been put into the system. I know that's not a very accurate yardstick, hence the smiley. :o) My understanding is that the technology Powerset got from Xerox is a production quality, multiple language parsing system with a language-independent core, with the long development time being due to the engineers being allowed to work on the problem until they had solved it to their satisfaction. Of course, all of my information comes from the above-mentioned presentation, so a large pinch of salt is almost certainly required. :o)

anaphoric 19y ago

Honestly it may be somewhat heretical to say it, but I doubt very seriously that an old Xerox patent really has so much relevance. The academic community has been working with semantic indexes for quite some time. I know many of those involved. The real question is whether they have developed something fundamental recently. As for performance, yes perhaps they have some innovations. But with NLIs its usability that matters the most in the end. At a more technical level I think the question is how expressive/consistent is the logical form they are mapping too. If they have developed a parser that maps to an LF that can lead to actual inferece then that would mean something. But then they need an open domain strategy to actually reason over such expressions in a meaningful/useful way. We will see.

neilk 19y ago
To me, the idea that they went back to a thirty-year old algorithm is the one credible thing in the whole story. Almost nobody reads old papers in computer science. Somewhere out there in the libraries are the computing equivalents of transparent aluminum, but you can barely get researchers to look at this stuff, let alone Joe Javahead.
- anaphoric 19y ago
  Good point. And actually from another post in this thread it sounds like it is more than a patent/algorithm, it is a painstakingly built system. So yes perhap they have something. We will see. As for you comment about researchers not being aware of the literature, I agree 100%. I review from time to time and the number of papers that are reinventing the wheel (and doing so in a sloppy way) is staggering. I think the problem is that too many researchers are just concerned with building up as many papers as possible to beat the tenure clock and/or to impress their rivals. Evaluators somehow need to stop bean counting publications as a measure of merit. The problem they face is they don't know how else to evaluate...
- corentin 19y ago
  I'm sure that many interesting software gems were abandoned because the hardware was not powerful enough at the time. Plus, when computer science was new, a lot of crazy stuff was being researched; nowadays the academic research seems pretty close-minded.