Cognition Technologies Introduces Meaning-Based Linguistic Search
3/21/07 – Cognition Technologies, a Santa Monica-based Internet search technology company, has announced the commercial release of CognitionSearch, its evolutionary meaning-based linguistic search technology. The company claims that CognitionSearch dramatically increases the precision and recall of search results when compared to traditional search methods and technologies.
Based on computational linguistic science, CognitionSearch “understands” both the user query and the content of the documents being searched, which enables the software to deliver higher performance in the areas of precision and recall, the two main metrics that are commonly used to evaluate the effectiveness of search engine technology, the company says.
“The most significant and, until now, unsolved problem facing search technology has been how to increase the precision of search results without sacrificing recall, and vice versa,” said Scott Jarus, CEO of Cognition Technologies. “CognitionSearch solves this problem by ‘understanding’ what the user is asking, and then returning only those results which are relevant to the query. As an example, CognitionSearch understands the difference between a ‘bat’ used in baseball and a ‘bat’ that flies around in a cave. It also understands that the word ‘bill’ has seven different meanings, which are dependent upon the context of the query or sentence to resolve the word’s understanding.”
Cognition says that the underlying technology in CognitionSearch has been in development for more than 20 years.
Rather than competing directly with Google, Yahoo and the like, Jarus tells StartUp Beat that the technology is an enhancement to existing search engines.
“The technology is complementary and augments pattern matching search technology such as Google, Yahoo and Ask,” said Jarus.
CognitionSearch software is initially being offered to enterprise customers in the litigation support and life sciences markets.
Jarus says that in the short term Cognition licenses its technology to these content holders and application companies that want to provide advanced search capabilities within their applications. “Ultimately, Cognition will monetize CognitionSearch, once there is sufficient critical mass of users,” said Jarus.
CognitionSearch is now available for use by the general public through the company’s demonstration web site at www.cognitionsearch.com. Users have the ability to search content in the areas of health, politics, government and legal.
CognitionSearch – www.cognitionsearch.com
Cognition Technologies – www.cognition.com
