e lists and
diary) and non-personal information (Seneca and Moses) will be overcome, so that
you can get to both types anytime. I would love to have something that tells me,
when next I am at a conference and someone steps up, smiling to say hello, who
this person is, where last I met him/her, and what we said then!

But that is the future. Today, the Web has made big changes in the way I shop (I
spent 20 minutes looking for plane routes for my next trip with a difficult
transition on the Web, instead of waiting for my secretary to ask the travel
agent, which takes a day). I look for information on anything I want to know
about, instead of having to make a trip to the library and look through
complicated indexes. I send e-mail to you about this question, at a time that is
convenient for me, rather than your having to make a phone appointment and then
us talking for 15 minutes. And so on.

*Interview of August 8, 1999

= What has happened since our first interview?

Over the past 12 months I have been contacted by a surprising number of new
information technology (IT) companies and startups. Most of them plan to offer
some variant of electronic commerce (online shopping, bartering, information
gathering, etc.). Given the rather poor performance of current non-research
level natural language processing technology (when is the last time you actually
easily and accurately found a correct answer to a question to the Web, without
having to spend too much time sifting through irrelevant information?), this is
a bit surprising. But I think everyone feels that the new developments in
automated text summarization, question analysis, and so on, are going to make a
significant difference. I hope so!--but the level of performance is not
available yet.

It seems to me that we will not get a big breakthrough, but we will get a
somewhat acceptable level of performance, and then see slow but sure incremental
improvement. The reason is that it is very hard to make your computer really
"understand" what you mean--this requires us to build into the computer a
network of "concepts" and their interrelationships that (at some level) mirror
those in your own mind, at least in the subjects areas of interest. The surface
(word) level is not adequate -- when you type in "capital of Switzerland",
current systems have no way of knowing whether you mean "capital city" or
"financial capital". Yet the vast majority of people would choose the former