The following is an excerpt from an article that appeared under the rubric "IT Management: The Future of the IT Organisation" on ComputerWeekly.com on July 22, 2003.
by Andy Favell
Tuesday 22 July 2003
What will IT have achieved, five years from now? Computer Weekly approached some of the more creative corporate research and development establishments and asked them to preview their most interesting projects. Andy Favell highlights a few that caught our eye.
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Natural language search: Xerox Parc
It is not the coolest name, but the Knowledge Extraction from Document Collections (KXDC) team at the Palo Alto Research Center has a bold, long-term vision "to build computers that can acquire and reason with information that is expressed in natural language, and can communicate in natural language on a par with human peers".
Reinhard Stolle, research scientist at Parc, says, "This is clearly an extremely ambitious long-term goal, but we have many ideas about how to create valuable intermediate milestones along the way, and our results are very encouraging."
In the future, users will converse with the video recorder, saying, for example, "Record Frasier tonight. VCR: there are two episodes tonight. The one after the news."
In business, natural language will help companies such as insurance, banking, legal and pharmaceutical firms to search through huge databases of information and organise them by identifying redundant documents. Stolle believes that it could improve customer relationship management and content management applications.
An early incarnation of this technology is used on a database of technical documents relied on and constantly added to by copier and printer service technicians at Xerox.
The key is to teach the computer to recognise "aboutness", so the system can tell the difference between documents that are, say, pro- or anti-war in Iraq. A user could request a news site to send a document that confirms a merger when it is published, without having it send speculative articles.
Related projects at Parc include using natural language to improve computer translation and enhancing techniques for scanning huge libraries of documents and turning them into digital documents.
The KXDC team expects elements of its work to be ready during this decade.
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