maebmij’s blog

Michael Howard is Microsoft’s security program manager. Here’s his office door:

(his blog entry)

A bit of work-related musing about natural language question answering (eg AskJeeves) for individual web sites:

Most of the time, when I search a site, I’m looking for a document, rather than an answer to a specific question - eg campus maps, unit home pages, API function lists… In this sense, the search field is like asking for directions on the street - my questions would usually be “where is the…” or “how can I find…” which aren’t actually looking for literal answers but ‘directions’ to some object.

I think there’s a parallel to surgeon-in-operating-theatre language for this kind of thing - “scalpel!” instead of “could you pass the scalpel?” - it’s obvious what is required, and it’s quicker and less ambiguous to specify exactly what you want without wrapping it up in an indirect speech act.

One of the talks at SummerFest last week mentioned a natural language interface to a PDA, where users could say things like “show me a map of this area” - the researcher said that the users in their test quickly discovered they could just say “map” and get the same response, and thereafter preferred that mode of interaction. I think this suggests the following:

• Full questions for straightforward requests are a chore which we only perform when we have a ‘theory of mind’ about the listener, and thus want to be polite.
• The AI behind QA hasn’t proved itself to be good enough that we trust it to answer complex questions, so we try to take control by giving it what we feel are specific, unambiguous commands or patterns.