Answers.com announced today its acquisition of natural language processing (NLP) company Brainboost Technology.
Brainboost takes a heuristic (pattern-matching) based approach to identifying likely answers to questions. They have a question-answering engine that will expand Answers.com’s database of answers to user-posed questions.
The field of Natural Language Processing has evolved quite a bit from the early days of Ask Jeeves, where NLP simply meant removing a few prepositions from a user query, then submitting the rest as a simple search term. Even so, a random test of questions to the Brainboost engine resulted in a mixed bag of responses. Some were dead on, but others missed seemingly “easy” answers.
Combined with Answers.com’s extensive knowledge base of reference data, the inclusion of Brainboost should provide a robust and comprehensive question answering capability. The knock on Brainboost to-date has been its reliance on serving up web pages rather than answers, while Answers.com has strong reference data, but when the questions went outside that realm, could merely pass the query through Google.
Answers.com (the former GuruNet) has begun to establish itself in the search/research field. With this acquisition and some smart channel partnerships, it is poised to give Ask.com a run for its money.
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