This brings to mind the great difficulty our systems (and Google's)
have in interpreting real questions. I've been experimenting with the
challenge with my Phonepedia project[1]. A search for "coots" yields a
good result:
> The coots are medium-sized water birds which are members of the rail
> family. They constitute the genus Fulica. The greatest species
> var... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coot
Unfortunately it's miserable at properly interpreting the phrase "what
do coots eat" and returns a list of birds of Niue. The query "Coots,
birds" returns an article on the Eurasian coot.
"Coots" is also a difficult term for the voice recognition, and in my
tests was transcribed as "coops" and "hoops" almost as often as it was
properly recognized. One query was transcribed as "what do coops eat,
birds?" and yielded an article on falconry. I added "birds" to some of
the queries to give the search a domain, since I'm not the only one
who thinks (old) coots are people, not birds.
[1]: http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/12071
--Casey
Casey Bisson
__________________________________________
Information Architect
Plymouth State University
Plymouth, New Hampshire
http://MaisonBisson.com
ph: 603-535-2256
Received on Tue Jan 29 2008 - 16:26:38 EST