Software is constantly trying to figure out what you mean, and often it guesses wrong. If you were curious about employment at the maker of iPods and typed "turnover at apple" into Google, the top results would be for apple turnover recipes.
It's not just search engines—the same problem crops up in software that aims to translate, recognize speech, analyze the mood surrounding a product launch, or deliver targeted advertisements.
A startup called Idilia, based in Montreal, Canada, has built software to make all these applications better at what they do. The software focuses on the problem of word-sense disambiguation—choosing the meaning of a word based on what makes the most sense in context. Word-sense disambiguation is an old artificial intelligence problem that has proved thorny over the decades. For a computer to apply a word correctly in context, it has to have a huge amount of background information—not just what's in a dictionary but also a map of how words fit together both grammatically and conceptually.
To read the full, original article click on this link: What Do You Mean? - Technology Review
Author: Erica Naone
