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Is It OK to Drink and Drive? Lexxe vs. Powerset

Source: MyLinguistics - Marguerite Leenhardt's Web Log

Website: http://blog.leenhardt.name/post/2009/03/30/is-it-ok-to-drink-and-drive-Lexxe-vs-Powerset

Author: Marguerite Leenhardt

Translator: Antoine Blachaire

Date: Mar. 30th, 2009

Lexxe, whose alpha version was released in 2005, was at beginning of 2007 part of the Top 100 alternative search engine, according to Charles S. Knight in this article. He also talked again about Lexxe, later that year, in an article full of information on the operation of Lexxe, which was the Search Engine of the Day :

Lexxe is one of the new Semantic ("meaning based") search engines that are designed to let you ask a question in plain language,
He says, before noticing that this tool uses Automated Language Processing (Natural Language Processing).
Lexxe treats the keywords as "words", not symbols ... (it) addresses the linguistic property within the keywords as a core issue for search,
he specifies, before adding:
Lexxe does not use "website popularity" as a factor to decide if a webpage is relevant or not. The relevance of a webpage is decided by the matching between the keywords and the content of the webpage based on Lexxe's linguistic computing and algorithms.
Thus Lexxe is a search engine that relies on language analysis technologies, like Powerset, which we talked about in one or two articles. Born around the same time - to my knowledge we both started to hear from them between 2005 and 2007-, before Microsoft bought Powerset in 2008.

PowersetLogo.jpg

Even if comparing the search results returned by each engine to the same request must not be seen as an absolute indication of their general performances, we still had a look at the search results...

Answer from Powerset

PowersetReponse_m.jpg

Answer from Lexxe

LexxeReponse_m.jpg

 

Immediately we notice: Lexxe "dares" to answer whereas Powerset seems a bit lost. Let's not exaggerate and let's not take Lexxe's positive answer for granted.

We have to admit that the question asked "is it ok to drink and drive?" (thank you AntEater for this good example), does not fit the conventional/classic interrogative form, for example in the context of Question/Answer: no interrogative word (like "wh-") at the beginning of the sentence, subject and verb are in inverted order and there is no named entity (for example the name of a person).

We should also have a look at the size of the words' window (?); for example, if the collocation "drink and drive" shows up in at least the first 5 results from Lexxe, it does not appear in the first 5 results from Powerset.

In any case, I hope Lexxe will improve in the future, as it seems promising in the non specialized (generic) search engine area. This comment echoing these older feedbacks:
"So far it (Lexxe) hasn't generated as much buzz, but the fact that it's in beta, and working is promising."
"This completely new search engine is great from the start, even in it's alpha version if you search in English."
"The concept of Lexxe will be more visible with a query like 'Who was Nietzsche'. As expected, Google produces a very long list of relevant links, but there is no topical order. In contrast Lexxe which is clustering: - German Philosopher of the Late 19th - Superman ( Übermensch) - Minister - Mother - Reader - Clergyman - Author - Etc. I'm interested in his relationship to his mother and get more relevant links to his biography, to his medical history, to his mother etc. That's the true strength of Lexxe - topical drilling"

 

 
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