MIT creates search engine to aid students to find topics within video taped lectures

Wow, 2 AI / natural language recognition search related posts in one day! Faculty and students of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a search engine that allows students to search video taped lectures as they might a text based web site. Lectures that have been video taped are fed to speech to text software that captures a transcript, the text is then divided into groups of words, or topics, that are analyzed for key-word density. Students can then query the search engine for topics and be guided directly to the portion of the video that best matches the query, therefor saving the trouble of scanning an entire lecture to find a specific portion. Best of all it's not just for MIT students, in fact its openly available thanks to MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative. Guess I know how my weekend is going to be spent! Give it a try! (Requires Real Player Plug in)

Natural Language Search Engine [true knowledge]

TechCrunch tipped me off to this new search engine, [true knowledge]. It's currently in private beta, which I'm hoping to be accepted to, but the video below does a fine job of spelling out the features / advantages to natural language searches. I've been playing with natural language chatbots for a six or seven years and have always had a soft spot for the technology. It will be interesting to follow [true knowledge] to see if others find the technology equally interesting. I think that those new to the Internet (if there still is anyone out there) will find this very intuitive, it's also a much more efficient way to find simple one line type answers. It will be interesting to see if those who are accustomed to the current search engine methods will see the benefit of natural language type queries. Also interesting to follow will be the success of the user contributed responses, have they found a way to keep people honest and thwart the attempts of those who would try to deceive others?

Good luck [true knowledge], I'm anxious to give it a try!