Wolfram Alpha Disambiguating Queries
From last post Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” is Amazing Stats, At Your Fingertips
Any search engines faces the “disambiguation” challenge, figuring out what someone is after when a word can have multiple meanings. Did “apple” mean the fruit or the computer company, for example.
Search engines traditionally use related search options to assist users. In addition, they rely on the fact that by presenting up to 10 different listings per page, they have multiple chances of guessing at the query intent correctly.
Wolfram Alpha, by having a single answer page, doesn’t get such chances. So to help, it makes its best guess at what particular meaning it thinks a word has and presents options to get other answers, based on other definitions. For example with “apple,” it defaults to the “financial entity” term but suggests there’s also:
- a species specification
- a spacecraft
- a general material
- a food
It then allows the user to change their answer based on those:
Wolfram says a huge amount of work has gone into having human editors develop the classification schemes. These are used for more than helping searches select the right definitions for their searches. They also allow the service to know how to automatically blend answers from different data sources into a single page.
For instance, Wolfram Alpha has lots of information from different sources about foods. It has lots of information from different sources about financial data. When a search is done for Apple, and it knows someone means Apple the computer company, it uses this tagging or classification to pull relevant data only out of financial databases, to create an Apple page on the fly. Food information is not used — otherwise, you’d have an odd page where along with a financial chart for the company, you might also get nutrition information for the fruit.
The service also makes use of IP data to help disambiguate. If by using your IP address, it knows you’re near a particular city, then it will use that along with other factors to decide which “city” data to show you in the case of multiple cities with the same name. A “city fame index” is also used.
