9 Jun
2014
9 Jun
'14
2:56 p.m.
Terry Duell wrote:
Obviously natural language processing must be an extremely difficult
problem,
if Google with all their expertise and processing power can't put a
natural language,
front end on their search engine.
I wonder whether some entrepreneurial start-up company with a new idea;
might put together software
which disambiguates say short English language search questions via a
dialogue;
then compiles a complex Google search string, to achieve that result ?
regards
Rohan McLeod
Hope that
helps somewhat at least ;-)
Don't think so :-(
I'll keep searching for clues. The way Google seems to work these days one
has to be quite enlightened to figure out the right search string to get
an answer that helps. 
9 Jun
9 Jun
6:05 p.m.
Rohan McLeod <rhn(a)jeack.com.au> wrote:
Obviously natural language processing must be an
extremely difficult
problem,
That depends on what kind of processing you want to do and what results you
hope to achieve from it.
At a deeper level, there are still foundational disagreements about how best to
construct a systematic theory of the semantics of natural languages. Important
progress has been made in this area over the last century, however, which is
very encouraging. (I wrote my PhD in this area).
if Google with all their expertise and processing
power can't put a
natural language,
front end on their search engine.
I suspect they've concluded that their ranking and query analysis algorithms
already employ the most effective techniques available. I have no doubt that
the designers of Google Search are well versed in the literature of natural
languge processing - Google employ PhD graduates in large numbers.
I wonder whether some entrepreneurial start-up company
with a new idea;
might put together software
which disambiguates say short English language search questions via a
dialogue;
then compiles a complex Google search string, to achieve that result ?
They would have to perform consistently better than Google's own query
processing algorithms to be worthwhile though.
9:10 p.m.
Jason White wrote:
Rohan McLeod <rhn(a)jeack.com.au> wrote:
.....................snip
They would have to perform consistently better than Google's own query
processing algorithms to be worthwhile though.
Jason; just so I'm sure we are talking about the same thing;
the issue I am concerned with is translating a natural language search
query,
into the Google search string, which most economically returns the required
result. Not setting up some alternative to Google's search algorithm ! Yes ?
regards Rohan McLeod
9:17 p.m.
Rohan McLeod <rhn(a)jeack.com.au> wrote:
Jason; just so I'm sure we are talking about the
same thing;
the issue I am concerned with is translating a natural language search
query,
into the Google search string, which most economically returns the required
result. Not setting up some alternative to Google's search algorithm ! Yes ?
I think we're talking about the same thing. It would need to be shown that
some other form of language processing can consistently perform better than
just supplying your "natural language" query as input to the existing search
engine.
9:45 p.m.
Jason White wrote:
Rohan McLeod <rhn(a)jeack.com.au> wrote:
Yes certainly;
but surely the irrelevance of many search results indicates improvement
is possible ?
regards Rohan McLeod
Jason; just so I'm sure we are talking about
the same thing;
the issue I am concerned with is translating a natural language search
query,
into the Google search string, which most economically returns the required
result. Not setting up some alternative to Google's search algorithm ! Yes ?
I
think we're talking about the same thing. It would need to be shown that
some other form of language processing can consistently perform better than
just supplying your "natural language" query as input to the existing search
engine. 
10 Jun
10 Jun
10:29 a.m.
Rohan McLeod wrote:
Jason White wrote:
Seems to me that simply indicates that the incentive of most
principals is to return "irrelevant" results.
Even excluding SEOs, Google itself would return nothing but ads if
that wouldn't drive away their product.
I think we're talking about the same thing.
It would need to be
shown that some other form of language processing can consistently
perform better than just supplying your "natural language" query as
input to the existing search engine.
Yes certainly; but surely the irrelevance of many search results
indicates improvement is possible ?
11:21 a.m.
Rohan McLeod <rhn(a)jeack.com.au> wrote:
Yes certainly;
but surely the irrelevance of many search results indicates improvement
is possible ?
There's an entire field of research devoted to "information retrieval"
systems, the aim of which is to return the most relevant search results in
response to a query. Google has considerable expertise in this area - in fact,
as I recall, Google's founders were conducting information retrieval research
at Stanford, and the company grew out of their research project.
What I'm suggesting, then, is that further improvement may require the
creation of algorithms that haven't yet been created (advances in
computational linguistics, database technology, information retrieval etc.).
1:42 p.m.
Jason White wrote:
Rohan McLeod <rhn(a)jeack.com.au> wrote:
I would be interested to hear about the thesis of your Ph D;
and your ideas concerning the above problems
regards Rohan McLeod
regards
Rohan McLeod
Yes certainly;
but surely the irrelevance of many search results indicates improvement
is possible ?
There's an entire field of research devoted to "information
retrieval"
systems, the aim of which is to return the most relevant search results in
response to a query. Google has considerable expertise in this area - in fact,
as I recall, Google's founders were conducting information retrieval research
at Stanford, and the company grew out of their research project.
What I'm suggesting, then, is that further improvement may require the
creation of algorithms that haven't yet been created (advances in
computational linguistics, database technology, information retrieval etc.).
2:40 p.m.
Rohan McLeod <rhn(a)jeack.com.au> wrote:
I would be interested to hear about the thesis of your
Ph D;
and your ideas concerning the above problems
My research is concerned with basic questions about how to construct a
semantic theory of any given language. There are foundational disagreements in
this area concerning the limits of semantic analysis, which I seek to address
by investigating Robert Brandom's "inferentialist" theory of meaning.
I think modern formal logic and philosophy have made real progress in
analyzing and specifying the semantics of natural language. Some of this
insight has been applied to computational problems, but there is much progress
remaining to be made on both the theoretical side and in computational
applications.
Search engines use statistical techniques rather than logic-based semantics to
process queries.
5:02 p.m.
Jason White wrote:
Rohan McLeod <rhn(a)jeack.com.au> wrote:
So would this have implications for the problem of constructing 'the
meaning of a sentence';
given the meaning of it's constituent words ?
I would be interested to hear about the thesis of
your Ph D;
and your ideas concerning the above problems
My research is concerned with basic
questions about how to construct a
semantic theory of any given language. There are foundational disagreements in
this area concerning the limits of semantic analysis, which I seek to address
by investigating Robert Brandom's "inferentialist" theory of meaning.
I think modern formal logic and philosophy have made real progress in
analyzing and specifying the semantics of natural language. Some of this
insight has been applied to computational problems, but there is much progress
remaining to be made on both the theoretical side and in computational
applications.
Do you think that the search engine problem might be broken into two parts:
1/ A precise symbolic way of expressing a complex search pattern;
say analogous to a 'regular expression' formula
2/ A 'short, simple sentence; natural language processing' algorithm;
which then constructs sequences of such symbolic search formulas;
equivalent to the disambiguated natural language sentence ?
Search engines use statistical techniques rather than logic-based semantics to
process queries.
Do you see a place for neural-nets in this area ?
regards Rohan McLeod
5:56 p.m.
Rohan McLeod <rhn(a)jeack.com.au> wrote:
They're among the probabilistic techniques available for application, yes.
However, neural networks are well outside my field.
So would this have implications for the problem of
constructing 'the
meaning of a sentence';
given the meaning of it's constituent words ?
Yes, exactly.
Do you think that the search engine problem might be
broken into two parts:
1/ A precise symbolic way of expressing a complex search pattern;
say analogous to a 'regular expression' formula
2/ A 'short, simple sentence; natural language processing' algorithm;
which then constructs sequences of such symbolic search formulas;
equivalent to the disambiguated natural language sentence ?
How would you then associate this with search results? It wouldn't be feasible
to parse and analyze all of the text of a large collection of Web pages, so
far as I am aware.
Search engines use statistical techniques rather than logic-based semantics to
process queries.
Do you see a place for neural-nets in this area ?
6:32 p.m.
Jason White wrote:
...........snip
I quite agree it is certainly not currently feasible to
"parse and analyze all of the text of a large collection of Web pages"
The aim would simply be to decrease the number and increase the
relevance of search results;
whilst ensuring the search was as exhaustive as possible.
Jason many thanks for sharing your interests in language;
regards Rohan McLeod
Do you think
that the search engine problem might be broken into two parts:
1/ A precise symbolic way of expressing a complex search pattern;
say analogous to a 'regular expression' formula
2/ A 'short, simple sentence; natural language processing' algorithm;
which then constructs sequences of such symbolic search formulas;
equivalent to the disambiguated natural language sentence ?
How would you then associate this with search results? It wouldn't be
feasible
to parse and analyze all of the text of a large collection of Web pages, so
far as I am aware.
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11 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
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Jason White -
Rohan McLeod -
Trent W. Buck