Sidebar: Artificial intelligence and the smarter search engine

Computerworld - Within three to five years, we could see a very different, next-generation search engine -- one that could extract specific facts, draw inferences and organize those facts based on a few key words, says Tom Mitchell, former president of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence in Menlo Park, Calif.
"Everybody who uses a search engine like Google knows it's a tremendously useful thing," says Mitchell. "You can type in words and get back Web pages that mention those words."
But, he says, there has been a lot of progress in artificial intelligence based on a much more sophisticated, natural-language analysis by computer, the goal of which is to get computers to read text and understand the meaning of that text.
Mitchell says what people are now able to do in the laboratory is develop computer software that can, when given a Web page or Web site, examine that page or site and find names of people, dates and locations.
"It can't read text and understand it in the level of detail people can, but already it can read text and can say, 'Oh, this is the name of a person' with about 95% accuracy and, 'Oh, this is a location; this is a date,'" he says.
Researchers have written computer programs that can find names and job titles of people mentioned on a Web site. For example, such programs can find "Jane Smith, vice president of marketing," or "Joe Jones, CEO," according to Mitchell.
"We already have in AI a very active and rapidly progressing research effort on automatically extracting really factual information out of the text," he says. "So now think about the search engine you'd really like to have."
Say you're a student looking at Web sites of universities to decide where to go to college, Mitchell continues. You go to a search engine and type in the things you're interested in, such as colleges that have a meteorology department.
But what if you want to know what the faculty to student ratios are at those colleges?
Well, you can type in words like meteorology, and then you can go and browse through the Department of Meteorology at a specific college's Web site, which might have 5,000 pages on it.
And you might stumble across a list of faculty members on one Web page, and then on a different Web page, you might find how many students in the department.
"From that, as a person, I could dig around and maybe figure out that the faculty-to-student ratio is