What is the difference between Lexxe and Ask.com in terms of question answering?
The ability to provide short exact answers to queries represents the highest level of Artifitial Intelligence and Information Retrieival and Information Extraction. Lexxe and Ask.com are perhaps the only two search engines in the world that tries to answer questions with short exact answers directly from the webpages.
Quite a number of search engines or computer systems on the Internet are able to answer Natural Language questions wiht long answers, because they do not have the ability to identify the exact short answers to the questions. They can, at best, guess that the answer may be located in the sentence, but is not able to clearly identify the real answer. For example, for the question "who invented the clarinet?", the best answer should be "Johann Christoph Denner", while "Johann Christoph Denner, a German instrument maker, invented the clarinet about 1700" can only be second best. Being able to capture the former, one can easily extend it to a full sentence answer, but not the other way round. That makes a huge difference in terms of class in search technology. Even among those who can answer with "long answers", most could only answer with a match in the manually or semi-automatically prepared databases of "Quesion/Answer pairs", which is a further level lower than the ones trying to answer with long answers, but directly from the webpages.
However, even though Ask.com is able to answer some Natural Language questions with short answers, due to the fact that Ask.com only recognizes very limited grammatical forms of sentences, its ability to understand questions is restricted, let alone answering them correctly. For example, if one asks "Who did Bill Gates marry?", Ask.com currently is not able to answer the questions, because it cannot parse and convert the "did ... marry" pattern in this case. Therefore, whenever a questions uses a modal/auxilary verb like "did", "does", "do", "will", "would", (for perfect tense with "has", "have", "had"), (for passive voice with "is", "are", "was", "were"), etc, Ask.com will, in most cases, fail to answer the them.
Lexxe is able to handle various grammatical forms of the Interrogative Questions that begin with 6W1H, e.g. Who, What, Which, When, Where, Why, How. So we estimated that Ask.com may only answer a fraction of the questions that Lexxe can answer. That's why we claim Lexxe is the first and only Internet search engine that can answer questions.
Apart from Interrogative Questions, Lexxe also offers Affirmative Question (questions that starts with a modal/auxilary verb, e.g. "can", "did", "is", etc and usually expects a "Yes" or "No" answer) Answering. Lexxe is the first in the world to offer such Affirmative Question Answering feature in Internet search engines. This allows users to verify facts using a search engine instead of doing keyword searches and read the results to verify the facts themselves. For example, "Has the climate changed?"
Ask.com also relies heavily on the database of name entities, which requires manual entrance, editing and updating of a very large database. For example, if one asks "Who is Craig Moritz?" or "Who is Hong Liang Qiao?" on Ask.com, it is currently not able to tell you, simply because the names have not been added to the database. Lexxe can handle such questions without such database support. Just try them on Lexxe: Who is Craig Moritz? and Who is Hong Liang Qiao?. In other words, if someone is not so famous, it is more likely that you get an answer from Lexxe than Ask.com. And there are certainly much more people who are not so famous than those who are famous in this world. That's why Lexxe covers far more people or entities than Ask.com in terms of question answering using the world wide web as a source of information. If your name or someone you know has a few occurrences on the web, have a try on Lexxe and compare it with Ask.com. You will then notice the significant difference between the two.
Someone commented on Lexxe with comparison to Ask (the new name for AskJeeves at ask.com), "Personally I think the the 'lexxe' search engine is a million times better than 'ask' because it not only gives you search results but also a straight-up answer to your question if it can." (mid-low part of the webpage on http://www.digg.com/design/The_New_Ask.com_Home_Page)
Lexxe is not perfect and we are improving it, but we are certain that Lexxe is currently the most advanced question answering system in the world.
Lexxe has only about 20% of the linguistic competence of a human being in Question Asnwering. We are trying to increase Lexxe's robustness in Question Answering everyday, so you can watch Lexxe grow.
Dave Lemen, a user in the U.S. has commented that Lexxe is certainly a more useful experience than Ask Jeeves has ever been.
The following is an interesting article about Lexxe's Question Answering System:
| Arion Londraville, Use Bombs, USA |
The Wonderful Wizard
Tonight Brett and I had some fun playing with Lexxe; a new search engine. It seems like a small scale operation and runs rather slowly.
A main concept to this tool is that it will answer questions you type in, preferably based in fact. Lets see how it did with the questions we threw at it.
Q: How many feet are there between earth and the moon?
A: figure the amount of feet between earth and the moon and you have the kind of statistic that gives statistics a bad name
Fair enough
Q: How much do eye lasers cost?
A: $40000
Remember that around next Christmas folks. *hint - hint*
Q: how much do hookers cost?
A: $1000
Considerably less.
Q: How do I kill Bush?
A: Shooting Him on the Street or Blowing Him Up with a Car Bomb
Ah, the first accurate answer of the night.
Q: How did this all come about?
A: Divine Revelation As They Maintain
Seems this search engine believes in Intelligent Design. Flying Spaghetti Monster anyone?
Q: What is the URL for Baskin Robbins?
A: Free Ice Cream
Sounds good to me.
Q: What is the website for Baskin Robbins?
A: baskin robbins ice cream flavors cakes milk shakes sorbets sherbets and frozen beverages are available from 4,
I feel disillusioned.
Q: When will I die?
A: 1/13/02 10:52am
(Other answers included “01-03-2003 2:54″ and “Tuesday Maybe.”)
That’s a bit foreboding …and approximate.
Q: Who will I wed?
A: Heather Mills in Ireland
Q: Why not Heather Mills in the USA?
A: Sir Paul Mccartney
Yes, he always has had plans to throw a wrench between the two of us.
Q: What can you tell me about Heather Mills in Ireland?
A: heather mills heather mills http://www
Well, we drove it into convolutions. Care to see if you can do the same? Feel free to post your results in the comments below.
[Jan. 6th 2006]
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| http://www.use-bombs.com/archives/2006/01/use-bombs/the-wonderful-wizard/ |
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