The Future of Search? It’s Academic - Asking the Right Questions
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Another fascinating project at Carnegie Mellon, dubbed Javelin (stands for Justification-based Answer Valuation through Language Interpretation), will take longer to mature. The project, funded by a government grant, examines question-and-answer search technology. Most of the major search engines can now answer simple factual questions such as “What is the population of New York?” Try to ask a more complicated question, such as “Which university has the largest computer science department?” and you run into some serious problems.
Jaime Carbonell, director of CMU’s Language Technologies Institute, explains the difference between the two types of questions. “This is dynamic information. You must parse the question, look for answers in multiple places and do a comparison. There are multiple steps, and we’re looking at how to do it one step at a time and provide a trace for the user.”
The Javelin Project home page, located here (http://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/Research/JAVELIN/), provides a comprehensive overview of the issue. Using a diagram and a mathematical statement that bears a nodding similarity to the Drake equation, it explains the factors that go into answering a complicated question such as “What are the consequences of the Sudanese civil war?” Whether a search engine gives any particular item of information to answer this question depends on a number of things, including:
- The item’s relevance to the requested information.
- The likelihood that the person asking the question doesn’t already know this particular item.
- The veracity of the item’s source, and how well the item supports the conclusion.
- The diversity of the source of the item, if, for example, the person requesting the information wants contrasting or reinforcing points of view.
- Whether the person asking the question is likely to understand the item.
- The amount of time it will take for the person asking the question to digest the item.
How the search engine presents the information also matters. It would defeat the purpose, and possibly cause information overload, to present everything all at once. To make it easier on the searcher, the project home page suggests that the search engine or application might start by “interactively presenting the main consequences, permitting him or her to initiate interactive strategy refinement.” Carbonell believes this technology will not be ready for widespread consumer usage for another four or five years.
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