i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Remember when the "chess-playing computer" beat a chess champion in 1997? Well, IBM is now ready to unveil a computer that can translate the nuanced vernacular of Jeopardy (the game). Check it out in this article.

Marti Hearst's discussion of social search in the reading for 11/29 reminded me of Hotpot, which Google announced about a week and a half ago.  At its most basic, the feature is essentially the company's own twist on Yelp: an opportunity for people to share their opinions of restaurants and other local businesses.  One interesting departure, however, is Hotpot's use of a six star rating scale. Six stars signifies "best ever", but users are only allowed to bestow ten of these six star ratings.    

 In today's lecture, Bob mentioned the differences between traditional linguistic and statistical approaches to language processing.  In my undergraduate linguistics major, I studied both syntax and "grammar engineering," for which we had to construct representations like the one below.  If anyone ever had to diagram sentences in middle or high school, it's kind of like that on steroids: 

 Human Jeopardy contestants impress me, but a computer that can give similar responses, in as little time, would really amaze me.  "Watson" needs to interpret clues, process information quickly, and give correct answers.  It's that first bit that falls into Natural Language Processing, which we'll be discussing in 202.  

Wolfram Alpha is a new search engine that launched in May that is geared toward an educated audience looking just for data. Instead of providing a list of links like Google or another search engine, WA returns just the data and relevant graphs. The system's strengths are real-time calculations, powerful algorithms that search the web, and curated data sets.