--- Forwarded Message from "Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D." <[log in to unmask]> --- >Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 09:28:13 -1000 >To: [log in to unmask] >From: "Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D." <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: Re: Corpora: Ergo's Patent Publishes >Cc: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask] ------------------ At 08:28 PM 3/15/99 , you wrote: >On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. wrote: >> The patent for the tools that create Ergo Linguistic Technologiessí >> software has just been published by the U.S. Patent Office. Copies > >This is my first post to this group. I hope this isn't out of line, but I >was too tempted by the claims of this post to resist checking the online >demo. I tested it with three different problems: Probably the most important thing I am trying to do with my posts and with the Ergo web site is to bring some degree of science and method to the comparison of parsers. As you note all parsers have some problems and anyone can find a list of sentences that will not parse. However, this really does little to provide a good comparison of parsers and theories of syntax. It also ignores the fact that a web site that is open to any sentence is not the same as a product that is targeted to a specific market. For instance, the parser we produce can provide an immediate and significant increase to the amounts of navigation and control that are handled by a speech rec system. This is a quantum leap forward for those products and should not be ingored in a situation where many jobs for linguists are waiting in the wings for more NLP tools to arrive on the market. Currently speech rec systems such as those from IBM, Microsoft, Learnout and Hauspie, Phillips, Dragon and Java are all neck and neck in a battle for shares of a very important market. In addition we can add significantly enhanced question and answer and messaging capabilities to those and other systems. One that any student in this area cannot ingore. Download Ergo's "MemoMaster" if you want to see what I mean by the improvement we offer. In addition we have recently completed a Department of Commerce grant to create a Web Browser based on NLP. This device provides significantly more Browser functionality for the naive user, for the blind and for others. In a multi-media conference in Japan in November, we beat out Nuance Communications (a spin off from Stanford Research Institute) and the U.S. Navy for the "Best Technical" award in NLP technology. These awards and the products we create are not accurately judged in the manner that is implied by typing in sentences arbitrarily. To really see what our parser can do and to really be able to compare our parser to others, it is necessary to look at parsers together and systematically. We provide a means for doing that on our web site in the section called "Parsing Contest" where we post our results for sentences in three practical NLP areas and ask other parsers to do the same. I suggest that the readers of this list abandon the habit of just arbtrarily pumping in sentences and start organizing sentences based on practical real world needs and on observable criteria that can be compared on several different theories. Try the http://www.ergo-ling.com web site and see what you think of our standards our contest and our results, but more importantly see if there is any parser ANYWHERE that can come even close to what we offer. And more importantly -- ask youself the question -- if any parser was indeed superior to the Ergo parser why don't they just post their results using our standards and our results and put us in our place definitively and finally. The reason of course is because no one can produce the results we can. Phil Bralich Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. President and CEO Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 Tel: (808)539-3920 Fax: (808)539-3924 [log in to unmask] http://www.ergo-ling.com Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite #175 Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: (808)539-3921 tel: (808)539-3924