Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Evri's Garden Sprouts Some Search

I just published a blog post titled Evri's Garden Sprouts Some Search @ blog.evri.com. Here is a snippet:

We thought about launching a labs site where we could showcase our latest gadgetry, but decided none of us really fancy wearing lab coats. Many of us have gardens, however, and a few of us wear overalls, so we figured we'd instead start a garden to sprout new ideas. So, voila: we have a new section of our site called Evri's Garden where we'll be showcasing our fresh but not fully farmed veggies. Our first garden sprout is Evri Search, which I'll spend some time chatting about.

Evri Search exposes our text analysis infrastructure that automatically identifies and makes available linguistic links connecting people, places and things found on the web. To provide this enhanced search capability, Evri Search performs an exhaustive deep natural language processing based analysis of every sentence in our corpus. This search interface allows you to directly interact with the same back end system our scientists and engineers use everyday to fine tune the algorithms used in our applications to search on your behalf. The help section on the search page is pretty exhaustive, so I thought it would be more entertaining to just walk through some interesting queries.

One of my favorite queries is to find corporate acquisitions. To do so using the Evri query language (EQL), I can construct a query like:

[Organization/Name]>buy>[Organization/Name]

In this query, I am asking the system for all sentences containing a grammatical clause where the source of an action is a named organization (usually companies but also non profits and government agencies), the action is the verb buy (or similar verbs), and the target of the action is also a company.

The full post is @ blog.evri.com

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Evri is Public and on Chalo Bolo

I am excited to announce we have opened up Evri to the public today. You can see what is new in the Evri blog post titled: The Beta is Open. You can also install the Evri widget on your blog or website by following instructions at www.evri.com/partners-and-bloggers.html.

I've installed the widget here on Chalo Bolo, so if you take a look at the bottom of any post, you can click on the Evri icon to launch the widget. I'll spend a few minutes explaining what the widget is, and how it works.

A couple weeks ago, I posted an article titled: The Twittering Ecstasy of Communication. Here is a view of the Evri widget as activated from this article:


Our technology took the text of my blog post, sent it up to Evri.com, and in essence, applied machines to read the post similar to the way a human might; the system then generated a media recommendation experience enabling you, my readers, to find out more about topics discussed within the post.

In the view above, we see the user has chosen to focus on the social networking site Facebook. Evri recommended articles that are based on the essence of my post, but with a focus on Facebook. As we can see from the recommendation titled "Facebook, a narcissists haven..." the recommendation was pretty appropriate given my statement: "I've always had this nagging sense that these activities have an innate element of narcissistic junior highschoolness about them." regarding Twitter and similar applications.

Also note, that the graph in the lower right corner enables you to get recommendations for articles and videos given a pair of entities. For example, clicking on LinkedIn shows recommendations based, again on the essence of my post, with an emphasis on both Facebook and LinkedIn.

As illustrated in the screenshot below, note that you can click on any recommended videos and watch them without ever having to leave Chalo Bolo.


Finally, if you discover you are really interested in discovering more about an entity like Jean Baudrillard, the post modernist philosopher from France, you can follow his link to our detailed page all about him. And once on the detail page for Jean Baudrillard, you may discover that, for example, Richard Wolin accused Baudrillard of "all but celebrating the terrorist attacks, essentially claiming that the United States of America received what it deserved" in the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda on 9/11.

Please let me know if you have any problems installing the widget, and as always, I would love to get any feedback on ways to improve the product.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

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