February 25, 2008

Powerset in Forbes article on the Language of Search

Forbes.com has a special issue on language, including interesting articles and interviews by some of my favorite writers on Language.

I’m happy that natural language and semantic search was included in the special issue. Andy Greenberg from Forbes.com published his piece on language and search engines devoting a good portion of the article to Powerset and Hakia, featuring interviews with me and with Hakia’s founder Riza Berkan. The article, entitled “Language Web-lish” starts off with Andy using Powerset’s metaphor comparing people’s current use of search engines to communicating like cavemen:

A question in English, like “What year was Hillary Clinton born?” becomes what he calls a primitive “keywordese”: “Hillary Clinton born year.”"We have this great gift of human intelligence based around language,” says Pell, “and now we have to translate it into a grunting pidgin language to interact with machines.”

Andy described an example I showed him from Powerset:

When a user enters the question, “In what year was Hillary Clinton born?,” Powerset’s algorithm doesn’t simply scour the Web for this collection of words in close proximity. Instead, it looks at pages with an eye for their meaning. Reading the sentence “Born to Dorothy and Hugh Rodham in 1947, Hillary Clinton is a New York senator,” Powerset will disassemble the sentence’s grammar and extract the fact of Hillary Clinton’s birth date. That fact is then connected with the user’s question, even if the word order of the result and the query didn’t originally match.

Andy also went through an example from Hakia:

Taking the question “What drug is best for treating a urinary tract infection?” Riza Berkan points to the word “drug.” Hakia’s algorithm, he says, understands that the word contains a massive subset of concepts including synonyms and specific names of medicines. When it spots a term that falls into that subset, like “Amoxicillin,” Hakia can substitute the medicine’s name for the word “drug” in the result.”You don’t want the word ‘drug,’ you want the name of the drug,” says Berkan. “That’s a hidden failure in search engines, and people don’t even know what they’re missing.”

Other natural language and semantic search companies mentioned included Cognition Search and Lexxe.

As is typical, my friend Peter Norvig at Google gets the last word in the article:

Google’s Peter Norvig, the search giant’s director of research, knows just how complex semantic algorithms can be: His Berkeley Ph.D. thesis tried to develop one in 1978. Every sentence of text, he says, took weeks to analyze. “The result was kind of like a dancing bear,” he says. “It was amazing that it could dance at all, but we didn’t expect it to star in the Moscow Ballet.”But that doesn’t mean Google’s engineers are idly watching semantic search from a distance, says Norvig. The company’s thousands of engineers are looking at how to incorporate semantic analysis into a search algorithm. But semantic analysis is just one of many directions that Google’s teams are exploring… “Basically, we just do whatever works,” says Norvig. “Instead of trying to understand everything, we’re trying to understand something about billions of pages a week.”

But does that pragmatic approach leave Google vulnerable to an innovative start-up willing to risk its fate on building meaning-based search from scratch?

“It’s unlikely,” says Norvig. “But even car companies have to worry about anti-gravity machines.”

I think that analogy is quite a stretch. It’s more like big car companies having to worry about smaller companies focused on electric cars. They don’t have to worry about this immediately but, at some point, this is going to be the future of their industry.

Posted by barney on February 25, 2008 at 12:16 am | No Comments

November 19, 2007

Natural Language and the Semantic Web: ISWC Keynote talk

I gave an invited keynote talk last week at The 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, 2007. The abstract for the talk is below. The image below links to the original video and presentation slides.

The live presentation (and video) contains technical demos that aren’t in the slides. Some of the demos are already available inside Powerlabs (e.g. Powermouse, which lets you browse and query our semantic database of facts extracted from Wikipedia), while some of these are still internal (e.g. an open search box, and output of our natural language system on full sentences). I also gave some detailed walk-through showing how Powerset takes advantage of external semantic resources like Wordnet and Freebase.

For me, the most fun part of the talk was toward the end, where I got to speculate on how ecosystem effects can make natural language search and the semantic web become deeper and more powerful more quickly than people might expect. For example, advertisers, publishers, and vertical search sites will be able to contribute ontologies that enable them to get more users, better internal search, and more revenue, while having as a side effect that the broad search engines get more knowledgeable about different domains.
The questions afterward were also challenging and interesting.



POWERSET – Natural Language and the Semantic Web

continue reading the Natural Language and the Semantic Web: ISWC Keynote talk

Posted by barney on November 19, 2007 at 8:29 pm | No Comments

November 1, 2007

Management changes at Powerset

In this posting, I want to talk about some significant management changes at Powerset. The main changes are:

Let me give you some historical context. When I first had the idea for Powerset and was looking to build my initial management team, I knew that as a first-time CEO my strengths were around the technology and vision and not necessarily around management of a large organization. I sought out a strong operating partner to share many of the C-level responsibilities while letting me do the things I was great at. And that’s how I found Steve Newcomb, who became my cofounder and our COO. This partnership worked well during the formation and rapid growth of the company. While I focused on the strategy around Powerset’s vision and technology and connecting Powerset with the outside world, Steve lead the company internally and brought strengths in execution on several other fronts. We can all be proud of what we accomplished during Powerset’s early days but with the company’s very rapid growth and the team’s great progress, we knew it was time to re-evaluate.

After extensive thought and reflection, the Board and management team
decided that the time was right for us to bring in a new CEO to take the
company to the next level and for me to transition into the role of CTO.
The Board evaluated what this change would mean for Steve, and concluded
that bringing in a world-class CEO who is a strong operational manager would
make the COO role redundant. By helping us get to this point, Steve did the
job he signed up for and he has now left the company. As many of you know,
Steve has been a strong force for the company and a key part of what made
Powerset an early success. He has also been a champion and protector of our
corporate culture. These influences are now part of our DNA and we will
continue to invest in and protect the inspirational culture that Steve
helped to build. Steve will remain a friend of the company and a major
shareholder and maintains the best wishes for the success of Powerset and
the team. He has personal passions in some new directions which he will no
doubt be writing about on his blog.

I consider this kind of deliberate reflection in order to make the best
choices for the company a strong testament to Powerset’s management team.
The result is truly what we all think is the best path for the company going
forward. Bringing in a new world-class CEO will help the company grow and
take advantage of the great opportunity ahead of us. I am proud of what we
accomplished to get the company this far, and I really look forward to
working and learning from a great CEO during our next stage of growth. And,
as a major shareholder in the company, I see this transition as something
that will result in great long term value for the company.

While I enjoyed being CEO during the initial growth phase of the company,
pulling together the early team and investors, and defining the vision and
core strategy for the company, I believe the CTO role at this point plays to
my best strengths and my passion. It also makes it easier for me to
contribute ideas and technical solutions without people taking them as
directives from the CEO. This was not obvious when I decided to be CEO
during the earlier growth of the company and in this sense it makes it
easier and more appropriate for me to be part of the creative team. As
Founder and CTO, I will also continue as the technology visionary and
evangelist for Powerset to the outside world. Ron Kaplan, who has been our
CTO and Chief Science Officer, will transition fully to the CSO title. This
also gives Ron more time to guide the core science at the heart of
Powerset’s differentiation.

We have recently kicked off a search to find the right CEO. We have already talked with some excellent candidates and are confident that we will bring in someone of up to Powerset’s level of quality. If you are or know someone who could be a great CEO for a company with Powerset’s vision and visibility, I would love to talk with you.

So that’s the background for the current changes. With that, I want to give some perspective on the development of startup companies, which may be useful for other early management teams facing similar stages of growth. The talents, roles, and personalities that work best for running a company are often different at different stages of the company’s growth. Each stage brings with it a challenging transition. Powerset is unusual only in the reflection and cooperation that the management team has demonstrated in making the right changes to propel the company through the next stages of growth.

In thinking about these changes, it is an interesting point for reflection about where Powerset is now and where we are going. It has been a little over two years since we incorporated the company and just one year since we raised Series A funding. What was largely a potential back then has become much more of a reality now. One year ago we had only a prototype, didn’t have a license or source code to our core technology, had a small team in general and no search team at all and people were asking why natural language might matter for search, wasn’t this impossible and hadn’t it already failed. Today, all of that has changed in ways that are beyond what anyone might have expected.

The changes we are making now position us for a next phase that promises to be really exciting. We will bring our technology out in real products that users will enjoy and that will trigger changes across the entire ecosystem of search. I think the next year is going to be an amazing time for Powerset and I am as passionate as ever about Powerset, our technology, our team and our future.

Posted by barney on November 1, 2007 at 10:51 pm | No Comments

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