SEOTall SEO Tall

None of the six bots that made the Loebner Prize Competition finals won the prize, but Fred Roberts’ Elbot was declared the best of the lot, winning a bronze metal. Only five of the bots managed to start.

NLTK looks very useful.

Evri is another entry into the ’semantic search’ space and has recently opened up a beta site with the slogan Search less, understand more. Evri is an startup launched by Vulcan Inc, a company founded by Paul Allen in 1986 as a private investment and R&D firm.

Here’s part of how Evri describes itself on their (FAQ).

HealthMap is an interesting Web site that displays a “global disease alert map” based on information extracted from a variety of text sources on the Web, including news, WHO and NGOs. HealthMap was developed as a research project by Clark Freifeld and John Brownstein of the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, part of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology.

Venture Beat reports that Microsoft will acquire Powerset for a price “rumored to be slightly more than $100 million”. Powerset has been developing a Web search system that uses natural language processing technology acquired from PARC to more fully understand user’s queries and the text of documents indexed.

Colin de la Higuera of Jean Monnet University will talk on “ Grammatical Inference: Some of the Questions Out There ” at 1:00pm next Tuesday in the large CSEE conference room.