Cognition for the web?

When we designed the first secure collaboration platform for Sri Lankan peace stakeholders during the CFA using Groove Virtual Office (as part of the One Text process) a significant problem faced was searching for and indexing information. GVO didn’t have tags, so the taxonomy we determined had to work for everyone. This worked better for those experienced in searching for information online as opposed to those who were new to PCs.

During the course of operations, we used a single alpha version of a tool designed to make sense out of information, the Semantic Navigator by ISX Corporation. It never really got off the ground – for starters, it was massively power and memory hungry, ruling it out for anything other than machines with the highest spec. 

Peacebuilding lends itself to a semantic database. It is in theory and praxis interlinked with a range of issues, actors, processes and places. The traditional keyword based search is incredibly frustrating to manage information related to a peace process, simply because keyword based search engines, including Google, cannot and do not understand the nature of the information they index. 

As Ars Technica notes,

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of semantic search, it is, in a nutshell, the exploration and harnessing of the meaning of words to provide more effective search results. There is a growing perception that current keyword- and link-based technologies used by most of the large and even not-so-large search companies like Google, Yahoo, and even Ask.com, have outgrown their usefulness because they don’t understand anything about the actual words used in a query. A word like “cold” could mean many things, from the physical state of an environment to having the sniffles.

 

Enter Cognition. 

Cognition’s technology is built on over 20 years of research into the semantics of the English language, and  “understands” four million semantic contexts (word meanings that create the context for interpreting other related words), over 536,000 word senses (word and phrase meanings), 75,000 concept classes (or synonym classes of word meanings), 7,500 nodes in the technology’s ontology or classification scheme, and 506,000 word stems (roots of words) for the English language.

Cognition Semantics

Check out this video to see just how amazing Cognition’s capabilities are. The narration is stilted and goes for the heavy sell, but it’s easy to see the potential of this technology for complex, long-term, multi-stakeholder processes such as peacebuilding and conflict transformation.

For a live example of Cognition, click here. 

After years of honing search skills using Boolean operators on Google, it’s strangely tremendously difficult at first to use natural language search operators. The results for questions like “What are the ethnic groups in Sri Lanka?” give you results from Wikipedia that keenly approximate a search operation using boolean operators on Google. 

Another interesting demonstration of Cognition’s technology can be found in this (US) case law index. 

The application of Cognition’s natural language processing technology to an online peace library would be astounding, with the one obvious limitation being that it would be limited to content in English. Still, this is the future of web search and indexing.