Re: Billed-as Ultimate Search Engine...

When I first heard of Autonomy back in December I looked into this Baysian technology and found very little. There is much more available on the net now. Quite a number of other companies are working with Baysian concepts. A local company here in Montana is using it as an engine for customer support.

On 7 May 2000 11:28:42 +1000, "Kirt Undercoffer" <kirtu_at_worldnet.att.net> wrote:

>Autonomy is using Bayesian text classification to classify and
>cluster documents and possibly to construct a de facto
>ontology tailored to specific problems using feature
>extraction techniques.. Bayesian text
>classification is a proven winner in this task (as is latent
>semantic indexing). The only real problem is that it is a supervised
>learning technique (although this isn't a real problem in the end).
>They use agents to do most of their processing - presumably they
>mean something more than moderately intelligent webcrawlers.
>Actually I have recommended to a company that they look at
>Autonomy because they want to provide specialized search/directory
>functionality for their business and don't have an army of editors
>like Yahoo or dmoz.
 

>Kirt Undercoffer
 

>Woodcock <EVSmalley_at_blackthespam.earthlink.net> wrote in message
>news:8e8v3p$k4f$1_at_mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU...

>> I think I may need a reality check on this. Anyone?
 

>> Wired mag, 2/00 "The Quest for Meaning": This article pretty much
>> convinced me that a piece of software I've never heard of is going to end
>> up running the world 5 years from now, which, when I take a step back,
>> seems unlikely.
 

>> Did anyone else read this, or has anybody used this Autonomy Systems
>> software? The gist of the story is that the real currency of the Internet
>> and the Internet Age is so-called "unstructured data", which just means
>> text in various formats on various topics. But the problem is that even
>> though this text is what humans want and need from the Internet,
>> computers don't really know what to do with it, and we have to tell them,
>> which defeats the purpose of the whole thing. Computers are good with
>> numbers and formalized programming languages, but they don't know how to
>> read a magazine article and know whether you'll like it.
 

>> And so now according to the article the company Autonomy has changed all
>> that, by using a hundreds of years old algorithm to give the skills of,
>> quote "comprehending context, generalizing from words to an idea, even
>> understanding the unspoken by grasping the root concepts beneath the play
>> of syntax." And so supposedly the software can read anything in any
>> language (without actually knowing what the words mean) and link
>> paragraphs in one document with most closely related documents from its
>> source (which could The Web, or The Company's Complete Knowledge Record).
>> And the implication is that this all works well enough that it can take
>> the place of human beans doing the same work.
 

>> The article suggest that these people are the only ones with a product
>> that can do this and it quotes the CEO saying they're on the way to
>> becoming "the Oracle of unstructured information." Meaning, they'll be
>> everywhere.
 

>> If somebody could point out the flaws, catches, and exaggerations so that
>> I can go back to my normal life, that'd be great.
 

>> Edward

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