Teragram Announces Direct Answers, Revolutionary Search Technology that Provides Real Answers, Not Just Web Links
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 16 -- Teragram, the leading provider of multilingual natural language processing technologies, announces Direct Answers, the latest innovation in search technology. Direct Answers technology seeks and quickly delivers short, specific answers to information-gathering queries, versus the traditional Website links provided by common keyword searches.
Teragram Direct Answers is available both as a hosted service and as software that is installed on the servers of Internet portals or large enterprises. The technology is flexible and can be tailored to extract information specific to each customers' needs, including information found on Web pages, in documents and databases. Teragram can specify which reference libraries and other resources Direct Answers searches based on the specific business needs of the portal or enterprise.
"We understand that time is valuable and that consumers want to uncover answers to their information needs on a variety of topics, not just a list of Website links to open and continue reading and searching within," said Yves Schabes, Ph.D., president and co-founder of Teragram. "Direct Answers offers portals and enterprises the technology necessary to quickly deliver more efficient and accurate results to queries."
The result of more than six years of comprehensive research and development in linguistic technologies, Teragram's Direct Answers technology has been awarded US patent #6,859,800 filed in 2000 ("System for fulfilling an information need.") and is the subject of several other pending patent applications.
Direct Answers at Work
Teragram's Direct Answers technology is already at work delivering Quick Answers as part of AOL® Search on the AOL® service and the AOL.com® portal. Quick Answers is a new natural-language query feature that complements AOL Search's popular "Snapshots" feature. Quick Answers deliver instant answers to questions entered in the search box, drawing from sources across the Web including the CIA Fact Book, Merriam-Webster, World Book Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, US Census, and more. For example, if a viewer enters "What is the population of China?" in the search box, the answer to the question (1,306,313,812) would appear at the top of the page above Web results.
How Direct Answers Works
Direct Answers utilizes Teragram's linguistics technology to retrieve answers from unstructured, semi-structured and structured data. Being able to extract both content and answers from all three types of electronic data is a key differentiator for Teragram's software.
When an end-user types a query into a search bar, it is initially parsed to compute the query's true meaning by analyzing it syntactically and semantically in a process that takes milliseconds. If the query is information-seeking, it is routed to Teragram Direct Answers and processed to provide answers.
As part of the Internet search version, Teragram Direct Answers comes with pre-built information sources which include a broad range of reference sources, including encyclopedias, the World Wide Web, medical research, calculators, time server, pop culture indexes and more. And like most quality libraries, Teragram's source list is continuously expanded, making it one of the most comprehensive reference sources available anywhere.
Direct Answers delivers results to a variety of types of questions, from full questions ("When was Paris Hilton born?" or "Who acted in Spiderman 2?", to "Who is the governor of Louisiana?" or "What time is it in Beijing?"); to couple word queries ("Iraq's capital" -- which it analyzes and determines is a question seeking the name of a city); to calculations and conversions ("8*1024", "10 days in minutes"); to dictionary definitions ("what is a terabyte"). A student researching the River Nile can uncover its origin (Egypt), length (6,695 kilometers), the population of Egypt (77 1/2 million), who is Egypt's president (Mohammed Hosni Mubarak) and what is Egypt's GDP ($316 billion)?
Availability
Teragram's Direct Answers is immediately available for portals and enterprises.
About Teragram
Teragram Corporation is the market leader in multilingual natural language processing technologies that use the meaning of text to distill relevant information from vast amounts of data. Founded in 1997 by innovators in the field of computational linguistics, Teragram alone offers the speed, accuracy and global language support that customers and partners demand to retrieve and organize growing volumes of digital information. Teragram helps customers perform more efficient searches and better organize information in more than 35 languages, enabling them to reach new markets and make better decisions. Teragram serves customers across the publishing, pharmaceutical, telecommunications and financial industries, including AOL, Ariba, Ask Jeeves, CNN, EasyAsk, Factiva, FAST Search & Transfer, Forbes.com, InfoSpace, Kofax, NYTimes Digital, OneSource, Ricoh, Sony, Verity, WashingtonPost.com, the World Bank, and Yahoo. For more information please contact 1-617-576-6800 or visit http://www.teragram.com/info.
Source: Teragram Corporation
CONTACT: Doug Russell and Chuck Kabat, both of Schwartz Communications for Teragram Corporation, +1-781-684-0770, teragram@schwartz-pr.com
Web site: http://www.teragram.com/info
