Re: this product seems to do most of what people talk about - mini review

I'm not convinced this was spam. I think it was a fit of enthusiasm, but
only Walter knows!
Adam

On 06/03/06, Giovanni Tummarello <g.tummarello@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I understand this is some kind of  targeted spam posting, but being
> anyway curious i took the time to try the thing.
>
> My mini review:
>
> ExploreXY is a client side tool for finding correlations between 2 terms
> (textual strings, say "foo" and "bar"). Its a client side tool, and this
> makes sense since each correlation search is highly specialized and
> therefore no server is going to to this for you (as its very unlikely
> that it would reuse any previous result). While there are not many
> details spelled out on how it works, i believe it does a bunch of
> initial google queries (or similar) to find related pages, then uses NLP
> to extract triples in the form of
>
> A - verb1 - B
> B - verb2 - C
> ...
> Y - verb3 -Z
>
> to link A and Z if these are the words you seek. But.. not only really,
> a lot of other results are provided the logic of which is not clear
> immediately.
>
> The problem is obvious: the instability of the overall procedure (in
> control theory terms). In simple terms:  NLP is amazingly error prone
> per se. , so each triple extracted will have a... say 60% probability of
> making no sense.
> If you multiply this by the length of the path you have a probability of
> paths being meaningless very close to 1.
> But more often than not are pretty hilarious ;-)
> I tried to correlate "uranium" and "electricity". A typical result is
> qualitatively as follows:
>
> uranium - is - interest
> http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/U/key.html
> interests - of - engineers               http://ieee-virtual-museum.org/
> engineers - learned - ways
> http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter02.html
> way - is - charge
> http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/static.html
> charge quantity - of - electricity coulomb
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity
>
> Other issues involve the time and resources taken while searching.
> Expect a rather simple search to take 10-15 minutes and make your
> machine fairly unusable due to probably bad programming practices (high
> priority threads? too much work for the garbage collector?).
> I wont go into more details as my impression is that it is of no use
> now. I was able to spot a few not entirely wrong correlations, but i
> feel this is more from the initial web site search than from
> understanding what these said (definitely nothing surprising here).
>
> A remark that i feel like doing however is that the version that i tried
> is said to be beta so who knows maybe some new trick is implemented
> dramatically raising the S/N ratio by the time the 1.0 is reached?
> There is undoubtly a great great amount of work in here.. and the idea i
> think is interesting. One can only hope that they keep financing the
> people who actually write and design the thing rather than whoever is
> doing spam like marketing (hopefully not the same person) :-)
> Giovanni
>
>
> Walter Henderson wrote:
>
> >Apologies for cross posting. I have been reading the
> >emails a colleague gets from this listserv.
> >
> >A company in Nevada has announced the release of a
> >product that seems to do most of what people have been
> >talking about on this list serv.
> >
> >It takes in unstructured data, recomposes it in new
> >answers and displays it in easy format.
> >
> >In other words, you don't need to be an expert to be
> >an expert.
> >
> >The purpose and goals of this BOF/list serv seems to
> >have been bypassed.
> >
> >www.explorexy.com
> >
> >W. Henderson
> >
> >__________________________________________________
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> >Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>