The State of Semantics

transcript

Seth GrimesAlta Plana Corporation

@sethgrimes

Enterprise Search SummitMay 15, 2012

The State of Semantics 2

“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”

Our goal? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alan_Turing_photo.jpg

Ken Jennings, IBM Watson, and Brad Rutter play Jeopardy!

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Watson_Jeopardy.jpg

Are we there yet?

The Far Side by Gary Larson

Ingredients:SemanticsPragmaticsSyntax

… and knowledge and structure. “Reading from text in general is a hard

problem, because it involves all of common sense knowledge. But reading from text in structured domains I don’t think is as hard.

It is a critical problem that needs to be solved.” – Edward Feigenbaum

Semantics: The study and use of meaning and relationships.

Semantics in practice: A dismissive criticism and seven semantic technologies:

“That’s just semantics.”1. Semantic search.2. Semantic navigation.3. Semantic advertising.4. Semantic content enrichment.5. Semantic data integration.6. The Semantic Web.7. Semantic analysis.

Thus the Orb he roam'dWith narrow search; and with inspection

deep Consider'd every Creature, which of all Most opportune might serve his Wiles.

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Eugène Delacroix, St. Michael Defeats the Devil

Old Search Semantic Search

Search on: keywords + identity, history & context

Sources: content/type silos

Unified

Indexed: terms + metadata (properties)

Returned: hit lists Categories / clusters / answers first

Relevance: PageRank (Inferred) intent

Prevalence: plenty of new platforms with old(ish) search

Plenty of established search with new(ish) capabilities, also wanna-bes.

New but old: Dumb and siloed

Better?

More better?

What about (2009-10 articles)…

Information access w/structure, sentiment:

Sentiment

Searchintent?

Context sensitive?

From search to navigation…Semantic search finds and produces

information that supports the searcher’s immediate goal, across appropriate sources.

Semantic navigation lets the searcher explore the result set via relationships found in the content (and metainformation).

(Advertising is pervasive. When is it semantic?)

To enrichment and integration…Semantic enrichment and integration join across types and/or sources and/or structures, using the meaningful identifiers, to create an ensemble that is greater than the sum of the parts.

Enrichment and integration involve:• Mappings and transformations.• Aggregation and collection.• All the typical data concerns:

cleansing, profiling, consistency, security,…

Content, composites, connections.

CCC 2.

Where do the semantics come from?Semantic analysis discerns and extracts features including relationships from source materials.

Features = entities, key-value pairs, concepts, topics, events, sentiment, etc.

Semantic analysis may draw on:• Statistics.• Patterns (regular expressions).• Linguistics (lexicons and rules).• Machine learning.

Semantic analysis fuels:• Text analytics…text-extended BI.• Search and search-based applications.• SEO.

Text Analytics

As part of a larger solutions...

Semantic analysis may also apply to:• Audio including speech.• Images.• Video.

http://www.geekosystem.com/facebook-face-recognition/

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167639312000118

http://flylib.com/books/en/2.495.1.54/1/

Last, the Semantic WebAn assemblage of standards, protocols, and functions.

http://img.freebase.com/api/trans/raw/m/02dtnzv

http://www.cambridgesemantics.com/semantic-university/semantic-search-and-the-semantic-web

“The Semantic Web has been and remains a parallel, incomplete, never-up-to-date subset of the World Wide Web and the

databases accessible through it.” – self-quote, June 2010

http://img.freebase.com/api/trans/raw/m/02dtnzv

http://www.cambridgesemantics.com/semantic-university/semantic-search-and-the-semantic-web

The state of semantics?

Online & social change everything.

http://techpresident.com/news/21618/politico-facebook-sentiment-analysis-bogus

Pragmatic.

Personal. Mobile.

http://timoelliott.com/blog/2010/10/sap-businessobjects-augmented-explorer-now-available-resources-to-test-it.html

Visual.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_york_times_longitude.php +

http://beta620.nytimes.com/viewer/longitude/

The times, they aren’t a-changin’

The State of Semantics

Seth GrimesAlta Plana Corporation

@sethgrimes

Enterprise Search SummitMay 15, 2012

The State of Semantics

Education