Google对自然语言搜索嗤之以鼻
Google调研总监（a director of research at google）Peter Norvig 接受了Technology Review的采访，其中一段是谈到对自然语言搜索（整句搜索）的看法，这是Powerset们正在努力研究的事情。下面是采访的原文：
TR: Companies such as Ask and Powerset are betting that the future is in natural-language search, which lets people use real, useful sentences instead of potentially ambiguous keywords. What is Google doing with natural language?
PN: We think what’s important about natural language is the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for. But we don’t think it’s a big advance to be able to type something as a question as opposed to keywords. Typing “What is the capital of France?” won’t get you better results than typing “capital of France.” But understanding how words go together is important. To give some examples, “New York” is different from “York,” but “Vegas” is the same as “Las Vegas,” and “Jersey” may or may not be the same as “New Jersey.” That’s a natural-language aspect that we’re focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we’re not concentrating on the sentence. We think it’s important to get the right results rather than change the interface.
TR的问题是powerset们认为未来将是整句搜索取代语义指向不明确的关键字搜索，google怎么看。
PN的回答是，google关心的重点是在词汇和短语水平，他们认为如何把词排列对应到用户想搜的意思上是最重要的。他们不认为整句搜索是多么大的进步，举了一个例子，搜索“法国的首都是哪儿”并不比搜索“法国的首都”更高明。
PN的回答也许让很多支持自然语言搜索的人感到不舒服。但是他说出了一个事实，人们对句子规则的研究还是裹足不前，映射到机器语言上来，更是对自然语言难以理解，因此机器语言的研究只能是局限在词和短语的水平。
当然他举的例子太偏颇了，比如搜索“how many times Man Utd. had beaten Arsenal in history” 和搜索“What is the capital of France”可不是一个量级的事，后者希求的只是一个答案，而前者则可能包括比分、进球数、哪项赛事等多重信息。
这就是自然语言的可怕之处。
Google won’t do natural lunguage search in the near futrue
Peter Norvig,director of research at Google,answered some questions in the Technology Review Q&A.One sector is about the natrual language search.The original texts are on the above.
Peter’s answer maybe not so comfortable for someone who is keen to the natrual language search technology,but he tells a truth.Natural language is so complicated for the linguistic study right now,and more complicated for the artificial intelligence.So google’s emphasis is at the word and phrase level.
[…] 尽管Google对于Powerset不屑一顾，尽管前两天还有powerset资金链断裂将被出售的传闻，不过今天它却发布了一个展示（showcase）版本，我们终于可以全面的体验一下powerset了，虽说它的搜索范围仅仅局限在英文维基百科。 […]