Barney Pell

March 2008

Barney Pell is the CEO of Powerset, a company specializing in conversational search-engine technology.

Futurist: What's your time horizon for bringing a conversational AI to market?

Pell: There's two pieces, one is what we're doing at Powerset and one is what is happening in the industry in terms of natural language. Powerset is building a new search engine based on natural language understanding. Search engines today are built on a concept of keywords. They don't really understand the documents that you search; they don't really understand the user's query. Instead what they do is they treat the document as a bag of keywords. And they take your query as a bag of words, and they try to match the keywords to keywords. The result is that as a user, the human has to try to figure out what words would appear in the documents that I want that would match that would work with this kind of search engine. Some people are very good at that game and using very advanced syntax and features and they get a better search experience. Whereas the rest are missing something. That's not good enough because search is now our way of getting all of our information from the Internet. Why some people are better than others is because some people are better at working with computers. But it's not like we don't know how to express our intent. We do it everyday. Every one of us is very good at expressing intent. The problem is that computers are not yet able to work with us on our own level. We feel inferior and like we're missing out on something. The time is coming when people will be able to use their own natural built in power to say what they want just in English, for example, and have computers rise to the level where they are able to work with the meaning and the expression and match that against the meaning of the documents and give you a whole different search experience. Not just matching meaning to meaning like keyword to keyword, but also presenting the results in a way that shows that the system understands your question and can help you focus on the parts that are interesting and helps you follow up with more of a dialogue to help you clarify your intention to guide you to something that's good.

In terms the schedule for that, in a couple weeks, Powerset will open up early versions of our system for very early users to come and get feedback. We expect that over the next year, we'll be coming out with a fairly large search index where a system has read every single sentence on millions of Web pages and is using that to let users do a search with natural language.

Futurist: Where do you see the entire industry going in the next five to ten years, I know Wikipedia and Google were working on similar software tracks right now?

Pell: I think this is an inevitable future. I think natural language is the inevitable destiny of search. It's go to become the center of the whole industry. I make the prediction that within ten years, people are going to expect routinely that all of the electronic devices that we interact with have some level of linguistic processing ability.

That doesn't mean that every single device will all have very high language processing capability. It will mean that for every category of electronics at the lowest end will all have very large language processing capability, but it will mean that our expectations will be that for every category of things we would expect to have some language capability. Within search, it will be over the next five years that people will begin to expect to be able to use natural language as your query syntax and have that actually an impact as opposed to right now where that actually hurts you.

Futurist: On a personal note, what got you interested in AI?

Pell: Actually I've been interested in AI my whole life. I loved games from an early age. I always wondered how it is that we think and get better in these types of games. I realized that the reasoning ability of intelligence was central to being human. When I was an undergrad, I went to Stanford and I initially declared my major in symbolic systems, studying AI and cognitive science. I started working in natural language while I was an undergrad. My entire career afterward has been about AI research and then developing applications and commercialization aimed at changing the world. I'm interested in how building other systems that could be intelligent reflects on our mind, which I think is infinitely fascinating, and also the transformative power to create useful systems to transform people's lives in fundamental ways. AI has both of those aspects for me.

Futurist: Can you describe a moment where you were working on your current project and you realized the future was unfolding in front of your eyes?

Pell: When I first started Powerset, I went to evaluate a bunch of different companies based on the technology that I thought was going to be required. We found the technology at Park that looked like it would be a good basis for what we were doing. Before we licensed the technology, we worked very closely with Park to create a prototype. At first, there were a lot of bugs. It was hard to get anything to work at all. It was all very strange. Then there was a change in January 2006, the second version of the prototype. My goals were previously to have something work at all, getting the system to recognize any type of meaning. In this new version, the system was doing more of those type of things so well that now I was complaining because the tense was wrong, or I asked for 'who did IBM acquire,' and it told me 'who IBM might acquire.' That you could even be that picky about a system meant that a new threshold had been crossed.

Futurist: You're saying that by working on this invention, it really forced you to focus on the words you used at an almost Proustian level, to learn language almost entirely again?

Pell: When you interact with a natural language based system, it actually draws out our expectations of what a language should be and makes you more aware. One fun thing about these systems is that they find new interpretations of words and phrases that humans gloss over because of our rich knowledge, getting an interpretation that we never heard of.

Futurist: Is there a particular example that comes to mind?

Pell: We were looking at the kinds of concepts the system had extracted from Wikipedia, and sorting them by what concepts and relationships occurred most frequently. We found that there was a really high proportion of sexual acts happening in Wikipedia data. This puzzled everyone to see. Obviously there's some sexual content in Wikipedia, but could it really be that much? We looked deeper at the sentences the system thought were examples of people having sex. They included things like 'john took his dog to the park.' It turns out that there's a sense of 'take' and 'have' and 'do' that's sort of biblical. This was before our system was doing proper word sense and disambiguation. So all those different meanings were equally likely for the system. It was basically finding double entandras and innuendo in everything.

Futurist: Give me headline: Ten years from now, AI does such and such and it changes the way people think about AI on a very fundamental level.

Pell: Natural Language Queries Replace Keywordese. There's already people tracking the length of the average query and it's been steadily increasing from two words to three words, steadily approaching four words. There'll be a crossover point where queries expressed in regular English will exceed the proportion are using keywords. Its a concrete metric we can track. I'm going to call that in five years. Search is something people use everyday. Once that point is reached, companies will start pouring more money into natural language technology, AI, conversational interface and semantics. The pace will pick up and it will take people by surprise.

Futurist: Do you envision something like a Hal 9000 for every home?

Pell: Absolutely. I think we will definitely get to the point were you will expect to engage your household systems in conversation. We're a long way from that. Over the next decade, we'll expect to be using voice rather than typing to interface with all our systems. Voice-in, voice and data out. Voice will become first order citizens in terms of the way we interact with computers.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker