Valentin Spitkovsky and Peter Norvig of the Google Research Team have posted an article about their new paper on dictionaries for linking text, entities, and ideas. They write, “Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas.” Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

This morning Google announced the Knowledge Graph, which “enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.” Read more

Edamam wants to be the one place where all the food knowledge of the world is organized. That’s the goal of co-founder and CEO Victor Penev, who launched the site in April, and recently updated the several hundred major recipe sites in its knowledge base to also include some smaller blog sites that add additional variety.

Semantic technology is helping the company reach its goal. “A big problem is that data about food is very messy,” says Penev. “It’s hard to find something, what you find often contradicts other information of what is good for you and what the calories are. So we set out to solve that problem. We played around with different approaches but settled on using semantic technology.”

The confusion arises in part from the fact that recipe sites themselves usually just hire services to calculate nutritional data. But that may lead to mistakes when calculations aren’t undertaken with exactitude — substituting white cream for heavy cream nutritional details changes the whole profile of the recipe, he says.

So, what is that right semantic stuff? One piece of it is that, in conjunction with Ontotext, Edamam built a food ontology. An ontology can be the foundation for a lot of things, such as extracting the knowledge of the chemical composition of a particular recipe and thus inferring its flavor and texture. And Edamam means to grow its own to include various datasets such as chemical data (for flavor and texture), geolocation (for local and seasonal recipes), product data (for e-commerce). and more.

But initially, it’s taken the simple approach, with the core of the ontology focused around classifying ingredients, nutrients and food. “We have started with the simplest ontology and focused on the most common use case — mobile recipe search,” he says.

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Lance Ulanoff of Mashable reports, “Bing has been reinvented, offering enhanced search results that tap into the power of social media. Microsoft has done this by pulling people out of search results and putting them in their place: A right-hand social column that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. It even offers a way to ask questions on your favorite social network, directly through Bing.”

Ulanoff continues, “It’s something of an about-face for the Number 2 search engine, which up until earlier this year has been slowly but surely integrating Facebook information (like “Likes”) directly into Bing Search results. Read more

Sharif Sakr of Engadget reports that Google has started to peek-a-boo it’s evolving semantic search capabilities. Sakr writes, “So, Google wasn’t merry-dancing when it promised to update its search engine with new ‘semantic’ algorithms. One of our readers sent in the screen grab above, which shows what happens when they search for ‘Howard Carter.’ In addition to all the regular links, there’s a box on the right that seems to be distinctly aware of who that poor fellow was (er, happy birthday old bean).” Read more

Randal Jackson recently reported how New Zealand company SYL Semantics is helping governments tackle Big Data with semantic search. Jackson reports, “SYL has signed up three government departments so far, but [chief executive Sean] Wilson says he is not allowed to name them at this stage. That’s not bad going for a company which was launched less than a year ago… SYL has a New Zealand patent for its technology and is applying for a US patent. Wilson describes SYL Enterprise Search as the next generation of enterprise search applications.” Read more

Holovision has been granted a US patent for context-driven semantic search. According to the company, “Context-driven search analyzes the semantic context for query phrases in web pages or other documents and clusters these sources into groups of results with similar meaning. This provides results that are organized by query phrase context. Search users no longer have to wade through pages of results to pick out those entries that relate to the semantic context in which they are interested.” Read more

Derrick Harris reports that PureDiscovery, a Big Data startup that we have covered before, thinks that it “has the answer to outdated enterprise search technology, and it’s called BrainSpace. The company claims BrainSpace can learn just about everything about how pieces of content are related to one another. That means users will become less dependent on searching for information because the platform will feed them what they want to know as they interact with other content.” Read more

Paul Miller recently discussed why many semantic search startups are failing to compete with Google, also noting a few interesting exceptions. He writes, “In recent weeks, I’ve received a flurry of information on partial alternatives to Google’s market-dominating search engine. Most appear useful in their own niche, but I doubt even their creators would be surprised to learn that none tempt me to change my Google-powered default search behaviour. Far more damaging for their prospects, any hope they had of attracting my occasional use is dashed by the very way that they seem to work. They may excel in certain verticals, or in particular types of search, but most make the unfortunate mistake of expecting me to mould my behaviour to them.” Read more

Amazon Web Services is now offering CloudSearch as a paid service. The official AWS announcement states, “Continuing along in our quest to give you the tools that you need to build ridiculously powerful web sites and applications in no time flat at the lowest possible cost, I’d like to introduce you to Amazon CloudSearch. If you have ever searched Amazon.com, you’ve already used the technology that underlies CloudSearch. You can now have a very powerful and scalable search system (indexing and retrieval) up and running in less than an hour.” Read more