SkyPhrase Is Bringing Natural Language Understanding to the Web

Some Web searches are easy to think of and describe, but complicated to conduct. If, for instance, you want to find "a nonstop flight from Las Vegas to San Diego next week on JetBlue," you have to fill out a bevy of fields on a travel site. SkyPhrase, a startup created by Nick Cassimatis, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will soon offer software that lets companies turn natural language questions like the one above into a format that their databases can handle. Facebook's new search tool, Graph Search, highlights both the progress that's being made in natural language processing and the difficulties that remain. Unlike the old search bar, Graph Search lets users enter queries as they might speak them.