Friday, June 29, 2007

How would NLP parse buzzwords?

More about Powerset (covered here before), which Techdirt seems to think is little more than buzzwords and patent threats. The start-up claims to be developing natural language search technology, and recently held an event in San Francisco to unveil itself to the world.

Among its many lofty goals, Powerset wants to become the ultimate web system, by creating what ZDNet calls "the natural language search mashup platform." For now, I've got to be as skeptical as Techdirt and think that these folks just combined as many hot buzzwords as they could come up with and slapped a couple of questionable patents on them. This kind of talk is a great way to generate venture capital funding, but likely won't do much to advance NLP. Hopefully it will turn out that Powerset has something great in store for all of us, and that this is all just some marketing and PR run amok, but until then we'll just have to wait & see.

2 comments:

Mark Johnson said...

What Steve was talking about in that quote is not the Powerset product, but rather Powerlabs. Note that people got to see our product, which is a natural language search engine.

I'll do a post on my blog soon about this.

Charlie said...

So when do the rest of us get to see the natural language search engine in action? Do we have to wait until Powerlabs opens in September?