hakia Beta-14

The human brain takes about 5 years of constant training to have basic cognitive skills. Most of those initial years are spent on developing sound and speech processing capabilities along with visual input coordination. Then it takes another 10 years to build up vocabularies and concepts. At the age of 15, an educated human brain might have up to 5,000 words in its active memory. Yet, the development of “understanding” and “logic” continues for a long time.

So, what is BETA-14 in the context of the development of the human brain? Well,… hakia is a meaning-based, language processing system. Therefore, there are unavoidable similarities between the two. I felt like it is time to give a new perspective to what BETA-14 means.

hakia.com has built semantic resources (with over 100,000 lexical entries in English) to match a super human. You can see the depth of our resources in hakia lab. No ordinary human would be able to match that capacity.

However, “understanding” is a different animal. It is the capability of tracing the conceptual relationships among the words in a given sentence to come to an “aha!” conclusion. Therefore, developing this “understanding” capability is considered an entirely different process.

hakia’s BETA-14 is a step toward developing its “understanding” skills by means of improving its Ontological parser along with more page analysis. We expect to reach the “aha!” moment in the upcoming months and that will mark a new era in Web search. Although the users of hakia can see some of such differences now on the BETA site, the upcoming “aha!” moment will make Web search drastically better for almost every query.

One important clarification is the needed here for the term “better”. Better means enriched. For example, the word “kill” in the context of “passing a bill in the senate” also means “veto”, thus you will be seeing search results including the association “veto” and “kill” to a query “did Bush kill the last bill in the senate?”. Zillions of such associations are missing in the conventional search engines today, and breaking this barrier definitely deserves the reconition of “the next generation” search technology.

There were many other enhancements to hakia.com in this development cycle. We will announce those one at a time in the near future. Until then, keep trying hakia.com, you never know what you are missing otherwise.

        

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 4:02 pm and is filed under News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.