Florida 344.5 ft
DC 410.1 ft
Delaware 449.5 ft
Louisiana 541.3 ft
Kansas 3363 ft

I use Mathematica and the biggest hurtle to using its awesome power is syntax. I am a programmer and you still have to get your head in the “functional mode” before you can use it in the way it was designed.

Right now I have been working on the “translation” for 2 sentences:

1) give me a list of all of the schools attended by the children of Republican presidents (can be answered with no code and Freebase Parallax), and
2) give me a list of all days in 2009 when the Google stock price declined and it rained in Columbus Ohio (about 40 lines of Mathematica code)

I am nowhere near close to how the “translation” is (or should be) done.

Regards..

If you ask me, this is the area of improvement that is needed the most… and not surprisingly, it is the most difficult problem to solve.

Richard
aafter search

However, the natural language aspect of Alpha provides no sense of multiple meanings. I asked for “world population projection” and got a response that treated “world population” as a vector and gave its projection on another vector. I wish that there was some way to give feedback so that the programmers could focus the same care they put into the name feature onto other types of searches. Perhaps Alpha should be labeled ‘Beta’ and every search end with a survey on how close it got to what you were really looking for.

Perhaps there is an opportunity for a new Wikipedia solution. Perhaps a Knowledgepedia or Infopedia.

I also feel that in case of Wolfram, natural language is there to stay. It is probably the whole point of it. Fuzziness of expression may be a deliberate goal. I’ll try to explain, what I mean.

To store and access huge amounts of data, one has to enforce some structure into it. That is, to split it into topics, categories, sub-categories, etc. Structure, however, is not uniquely defined. There is a multitude of solutions, without a single “right one”. So, to some extent, fuzziness is inherent to the problem from outset. As your data set grows, the question of “which piece of data falls under which sub-(sub-sub-)category” becomes increasingly painful and frustrating.

In Wolfram, I think, they deliberately turned away from this approach in favor of a different one, inspired by Web search engine, effectively emulating Web-like structureless data storage. In a search engine there is no such thing as “right” or even “correct” query. There are only queries which (mysteriously) work, and which (mysteriously) fail to do so. Although, in case of Wolfram all is a bit different, since they actually keep all of their data under control. Therefore design of search engine is likely to be very different from common Web variaties.

Natural language may appear to be just vague enough in a setting, where no structure in data is assumed (or, equivalently, all possible structures are assumed simultaneously). On the other hand, I don’t see any reason why they should extend with this trend beyond data retrieval. Well, at least Albanian foot-leke (with conversion table to US foot-dollars and foot-euros, based on current market value) are fun. I am not sure if, say, Google can be as half as hilarious.

My understanding is that they haven’t yet really come up with a full language. What we see is a very basic “expression evaluation” to debug aforementioned data retrieval capabilities.

PS: Just for fun, you may ask W|A to “Make me a child”.