Xerox Aims to Improve Search Results

Xerox Corp. researchers have developed a search tool that tries to understand documents, rather than looking for keywords, in order to provide better results. The tool, FactSpotter, analyzes the underlying grammar of a text in order to infer additional information, such as whether ambiguous words are being used as nouns or verbs, or to whom a pronoun refers, said Fridirique Segond, who manages the parsing and semantics research group at Xerox Research Center Europe near Grenoble, France. The analysis allows the software to understand that references to "Bill Gates", "he" and "the head of Microsoft" in the same document likely refer to the same person. But the software should also be able to tell that "Bill Gates said ... " and "A friend of Bill Gates said ..." do not precede words spoken by the same person, a situation that would likely lead search engines using keyword analysis alone to return irrelevant results. One of the first groups to use FactSpotter will be Xerox Litigation Services, which next year will build it into a suite of "e-discovery" software for the legal profession, Segond said.