Smarter Search Engines

Google a particular car type or disease and you're bound to spend time sorting between hundreds of more and less useful results. How to sort the wheat from the chaff in the world of too-much electronic information? NRC scientists are helping make the search for electronic information easier, and one key to this is teaching computers to understand language.

"The more computers are able to understand words, the more helpful they'll be to us in every daily task," says Peter Turney, an Ottawa-based research scientist with the Interteractive Information Group of the NRC Institute for Information Technology. The Interactive Information Group focuses on developing software tools to increase access to electronic information.

Turney's computer science speciality is the area of lexical semantics, or word meaning. At present, our desktop and laptop computers are linguistic toddlers. Spam filters, and other software such as editing tools, are able to distinguish and make decisions based on single words like "Viagra", but there's no sense of meaning. It's like learning a second language but not knowing what the words mean or how they create meaning together.

So the race is on to create software that goes beyond single word recognition to extract deeper understanding. One example is sentiment analysis. This is software that can determine whether the words in a sentence are positive or negative. Sentiment analysis is being used to create a kind of Googling for feelings. One application of sentiment analysis involves following financial chat groups to track attitudes towards particular stocks.........