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"Some web searches are easy to think of and describe, but complicated to conduct. \nIf, for instance, you want to find \u201Ca nonstop flight from Las Vegas to San Diego next week on JetBlue,\u201D you have to fill out a bevy of fields on a travel site.\nSkyPhrase, a startup created by Nick Cassimatis, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will soon offer software that lets companies turn natural language questions like the one above into a format that their databases can handle.\nFacebook\u2019s new search tool, Graph Search, highlights both the progress that\u2019s being made in natural language processing and the difficulties that remain. Unlike the old search bar, Graph Search lets users enter queries as they might speak them. And yet, this is still limited to a fairly small range of query types.\nWhile natural language processing typically involves teaching software vocabulary and grammatical rules or using statistical analysis, SkyPhrase\u2019s technology uses a combination of algorithms and data structures.\nThe company plans to release a website in February, as well as an extension for the Chrome web browser, that would allow users of Google Analytics to filter information using natural language queries.\nCassimatis says this could make it easier to find patterns or data points that are otherwise time-consuming for even a seasoned user to unearth. Eventually, the company hopes to offer SkyPhrase as a programming interface for other websites.\nNatural language search could make it easier for people with little or no training to ask complicated questions that typically require searching through large stores of data. Besides Facebook\u2019s efforts, Wolfram Alpha can answer natural language queries, and Apple\u2019s virtual assistant Siri also encourages users to speak questions aloud in complete sentences (some of its answers come from Wolfram Alpha).\nPercy Liang, an assistant professor in Stanford\u2019s computer science department who studies natural language processing and machine learning, thinks SkyPhrase\u2019s idea is a good one, but cautions that there is a lot of work to be done to make natural language processing work. He says challenges include determining what a word or phrase means based on its context\u2014such as knowing that Obama is not just the U.S. president\u2019s name, but also a city in Japan\u2014and the ability to pick up on sentiment\u2014such as a Yelp restaurant review that says, sarcastically, \u201CI had to wait an hour for this!\u201D\nUsers also need to know what they can do with the system. If there\u2019s a big gap between a user\u2019s expectations and the system\u2019s abilities, the user will get disappointed, Liang says. Facebook\u2019s Graph Search, for example, tries to solve this problem by auto-completing queries so users know what kinds of things it can search for. Likewise, Siri tries to answer only a limited range of queries.\nSkyPhrase is still clearly in its infancy. I tried a version that can conduct complex natural language searches of Twitter, Gmail, Orbitz and Amazon\u2019s MP3 store. It couldn\u2019t understand a number of my queries\u2014not infrequently because I was trying to get it to do things it hasn\u2019t yet been trained to do\u2014but it did a decent job of searching through Gmail, and understanding some complex queries about e-mails I needed to find as I organized an upcoming trip.\nSkyPhrase understands only searches for complete words (a search for simply \u201Cbanana\u201D won\u2019t bring up an email mentioning the game Bananagrams) and doesn\u2019t infer meaning from words (it won\u2019t pull up messages or tweets with words related to the words you\u2019re searching for). But it can understand conjunctions\u2014I could search for, say, \u201Cemails from Bob Loblaw in December and January about recipes with a PDF,\u201D or \u201Cemails from Bob Loblaw or Tobias Funke about cookies in December.\u201D\nThe company is also building a programming interface that Cassimatis says will make it easy for third parties to offer natural language search capabilities to their own services\u2014which could allow people without an artificial intelligence or linguistics background to quickly perform complex analyses of data that typically take a trained employee a lot of time.\nCassimatis envisions this API being used to squeeze insights from everything from financial information to sports scores. Eventually, it could also serve as a revenue source if the company charges developers to license it.\nPhoto courtesy of Flickr, Robbert van der Steeg"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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