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April 7, 2007
When is Natural Language useful?
In talking about Powerset and natural language search, I am frequently asked “When is Natural Language search useful?”. The idea here is that maybe there are some specific situations where you really want natural language search. My general response is that this is like asking “When is Natural Language useful?” to talk to other people? The very question assumes that there are some particular situations where you want to use natural language, and others where you would prefer to just grunt out a few words.
I am aware of a number of situations where it is really clear that you want the power and usability of natural language for search, including:
- alerts
- mobile search
- research
- needle-in-haystack search
- cross-lingual search
And I see a number of user segments where it is especially attractive:
- power searchers want the power of natural language
- novice searchers want the usability of natural language
- kids haven’t learned how to speak keywordese yet
- seniors don’t want to learn how to speak keywordese at all
Note the pattern here: young and old, novice and experts. It would be surprising if natural language appealed to people at the extremes but somehow was less useful for people in the middle.
But in a quest for data, the question arises “What percent of queries to search engines today are in natural language?”, with the related follow up “Is there a subset of use cases evident in those queries that might point out where people naturally turn to natural language?”.
These kinds of questions are perfectly reasonable, and they point out to the challenges of promoting a new way of doing things: you want data to support your new way, but most of the data is about the old way. If you buy into the “need data to justify innovation” trap, then you will find many reasons not to innovate. I recently came up with an concrete analogy to make this clear:
A group of business executives take a 1 week crash course in Chinese in preparation for a business trip to China. The school records everything that the executives say in China so they can learn how to improve the language education. On reviewing the transcripts, it is easy to conclude that business executives really want to use Chinese to greet people, to inquire about prices, to order food, and to find the toilet.
So is that what people really want to use Chinese for? Clearly not. This just reflects the small amount of Chinese the executives have learned. If they could say more, they would use it. The analogy to looking at today’s search engine logs for evidence about when people would want to use natural language is clear.
Posted by barney at April 7, 2007 8:07 pm
This entry was posted in Human Language Technology, Powerset, Search
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