Cognition Parses Its Way to a Better Understanding of Language
Cognition Technologies has recently added an advanced syntactic parser module to its language-understanding technology. “What does that mean?”, you ask? It means that Cognition can now “parse”, or break down, the component parts of sentences to deliver an even more accurate and complete understanding of the content. Since words often have more than one meaning, the ability to parse sentences enhances the technology’s ability to understand the context and sentence structure of the material being analyzed.
Cognition’s Advanced Syntactic Parser enhances Cognition’s Search technology by making fuller use of the meaning relationships between the words in a sentence (e.g. context), which is a key piece in the language-understanding puzzle. The parser improves upon the already high accuracy of our pre-parser system by significantly reducing error rates in word meaning disambiguation (i.e. understanding the correct meaning of a word based upon the context in which it is used).
“Cognition’s parser is also a significant stepping-stone to future capabilities which will take the technology well beyond just Search functionality,” said Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren, Cognition’s founder and CTO. “Examples include enhanced reasoning within and across sentences, anaphora resolution (i.e., identifying the referents of “he” or “them”, etc. within a document), and the development of a true question-answering system in the future. The parser is a critical component needed to bring a fuller sense of understanding to the content housed on the Web.”
Here are some examples of Search accuracy improvements due to the introduction of the new advanced parser are:
Query: “What happened after Rome fell to the Visigoths?”
The pre-parser system incorrectly interprets “fell” as the stem “fell” as in “to fell a tree.” The advanced parser recognizes that “fell”, followed by a prepositional phrase, is a better match for the “concede or defeat” sense of the stem “fall” and correctly picks that stem.
Query: When did the U.S. begin building monuments?”
The pre-parser system incorrectly analyzes “building” as the noun meaning “edifice or structure”. The advanced parser system recognizes that “building” must be a verb in the sentence and correctly picks the “construct” meaning of the stem “build”.
Read more info here, or try the advanced parser for yourself at www.Cognition.com. The Cognition Website enables you to semantically search Wikipedia, a database of Supreme Court and Appellate Court cases in the Federal Court system since 1950, the Medline medical abstract database, and the four Gospels of the New Testament.