Lorenzo Thione's Blog

The PARC Natural Language Technology

Think about this. A small, dedicated, unwavering and incredibly competent team of world-class scientists, researchers, and engineers that have for years looked at some of the hardest problems in AI and computer science and have refrained, year after year, from assuming that what they had done was already good enough and instead tackled and solved, one after the other, each most fundamental problem they still knew to be outstanding, before they could actually stand back and really say: "You know, I think we may be ready to really try and bring this to the next level". That's briefly the vision and mantra that has guided the NLTT team at PARC for over 30 years, building some of the most advanced Natural Language technology in the world. And it was the marriage between that degree of technical excellence and the vision that Barney, Steve, myself and the rest of the team at Powerset brought to PARC, about a new, revolutionary kind of search engine, that has taken us where we are today, with the commitment to change the face of search.

Ron Kaplan is now Powerset's CTO/CSO

As amazing as it sounds, Ron Kaplan, the founder and leader of the Natural Language group at PARC for over 30 years, joined Powerset last July as Powerset Chief Technology Officer. Having him on board for these past months has been a tremendous boost to Powerset's technical direction and development, and a phenomenal asset. It has also  been a challenge to maintain a somewhat low-key profile on his move from PARC to Powerset. While the negotiation was in the works we have been focused on making sure that things proceeded smoothly and without distractions and we really wanted the connection between us and PARC to remain somewhat of an unknown. It is amazing to be now able to tell the world what an incredible opportunity we have created. Alongside with Ron - as part of the relationship - comes the expertise and experience of a world-class team of scientists and engineers, who complement Powerset's very own amazing team, ensuring that we can together bring this technology to the world. It is indeed a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity and a challenge that we are all undertaking with the utmost level of excitement.

The missing link: Natural Language as the breakthrough in Search

PARC and Powerset have now a tremendous relationship and can move together towards success. But there is another piece of the Powerset story that goes beyond natural language processing itself. Powerset secured the rights from PARC to commercially use what we believed was the most powerful linguistic technology in the world. But we also added something very special, that we developed in-house, which is unique to Powerset. We redefined and devised a completely new way of transforming the traditional keyword-search core, and have turned it on its head, understanding the meaning of text and capturing the relationship between concepts, while being efficient. This was probably the most important innovation and contribution that Powerset has created and that we believe - in conjunction with PARC's groundbreaking technology - will enable us to deliver on the very bold promises we have made.

I am so incredibly excited by the opportunity, and humbled by the size of the challenge. We have access to incredibly powerful natural language technology, and I believe we have broken the mold and created a new kind of core, targeted at the future of search but able to benefit from the advances and lessons learned from the big innovators in search of the late 90s.  That, coupled with the fact that much of the distributed computational platform is becoming increasingly commoditized, both on the software and hardware side, really makes this one a unique moment in history.

And yet Powerset wouldn't have nearly the same chances without our amazing team. We have focused on attracting the most talented, smart and experienced people in the industry and we are creating a new center of excellence for search experts and for natural language experts alike. I am blessed to be working with such incredibly smart and motivated people. They are the ones who are truly building the potential for success of Powerset.

The Inevitable Destiny of Search

Search has become the primary conduit of access to the world's information. Every activity that takes place on the web, be it educational, transactional, or for entertainment, in a large number of instances begins and thrives with search.  John Battelle has called 'search' the new OS, the environment in which everything takes place. And yet there is more to be unlocked on the path to better search. The main problem is that the type of core capabilities that search has offered have not fundamentally changed ever since the main innovations that companies such as Altavista, Overture and Google brought to the world in the late nineties. We're still stuck with a limited model of how to model and retrieve information: we - as users - must anticipate the words in the documents that will satisfy our need for information, and must do so in an unnatural way. We have to convert our need, which we naturally would express as a search phrased in our very own language, to keywordese, which is less powerful, less usable, and less natural.

The search community has done a heck of a job squeezing value and effectiveness out of keywordese, but it's time for the next step.