March 23, 2009
Wolfram Alpha: A New Kind of Question-Answering System
There has been much excitement recently over the upcoming launch of Wolfram Alpha. This is a new question-answering system developed by Stephen Wolfram, inventor of Mathematica, and it is scheduled for a beta launch in May. Wolfram has been providing demos to industry insiders. I haven’t had a demo yet, but I have learned what I could from reading articles by Nova Spivak (“Wolfram Alpha computes answers to factual questions. This is going to be big”) and Doug Lenat (“I was positively impressed with Wolfram Alpha”). And this weekend I spoke with William Tunstall-Pedoe, CEO of True Knowledge, who also got a demo. Many of my examples and conclusions come from conversation with William (thanks!). Since life is short and so is the attention of web readers, I’ll give the rest of my thoughts in bullet form.
What it is: A new kind of question-answering system.
Examples
- Math: “2+2″ and then a few simple math questions: “integrate xsin^4xdx”, “what is the square root of 18″ etc.
- Business: “gdp france” showed amount and graph of how it changed over time. “gdp france/germany” showed graph with both amounts and the ratio
- “internet users in Europe”: Showed total, and a chart of usage by country in Europe, at the current time, specifically highlighting the biggest and smallest
- “ISS”: generates a graphic rendition of the international space station orbiting earth and updating in real-time
- “tides in san Francisco”: showed a graph of tides over time, where the times were listed in the local time regime current in the late 19th century for those data points. “tide NYC 11/12/1922” gave a single answer.
- “weather”: showed graph of average temperature in Cambridge, MA (where Stephen was when doing the demo). Based on reverse IP lookup.
- Computational fluid dynamics: typing in the name of a specific aerofoil produced a picture of that aerofoil along with its differential equations.
- stock prices: “MSFT CSCO” showed comparison chart
- chemicals: Substances at temperature or pressure, got physical properties calculated. “H2SO4” showed a diagram and chemical properties. “5 molar h2s04″ did something cool, I don’t know what.
- genome sequences: “AGTAG” shows sequences from the human genome that match that pattern
- data about people: “How old is Barack Obama” gives his age now. “When was Alan Turing born” gives the answer. “How old is Alan Turing” (a trick question) gives an error message with no human-readable explanation (True Knowledge, by contrast, tells you exactly why this is a trick question).
Coverage of data: It answers questions over the following types of structured data:
- static tables and databases (e.g. a database of internet usage by country by year)
- dynamic data feeds (e.g. historical stock market data, position of space shuttle, weather)
- numerical inference (e.g. math questions)
- numerical computations and simulations (e.g. tides, astronomy, chemistry)
continue reading the Wolfram Alpha: A New Kind of Question-Answering System
Posted by barney on March 23, 2009 at 10:03 pm | No Comments