Eureka Man » Experience http://eurekaman.com Pure Gold Mon, 28 Jun 2010 05:38:49 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Is there an uncanny valley for natural language search? http://eurekaman.com/is-there-an-uncanny-valley-for-natural-language-search http://eurekaman.com/is-there-an-uncanny-valley-for-natural-language-search#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2007 03:11:31 +0000 Eureka Man http://eurekaman.com/is-there-an-uncanny-valley-for-natural-language-search There is a hypothesis pertaining to robotics and computer generated, human-like characters called the Uncanny Valley. It states that as robots become more and more human-like, the comfort of humans interacting with them takes a sharp dip before it rises again towards fully human interaction.

Uncanny Valley Graph

In Fernando Pereira’s latest take on Powerset, he eludes to a similar nonmonotonic function for natural language search. Conversing efficiently in natural language requires that you can predict, to some degree of accuracy, what will be understood by your conversation partner. Systems that get uncannily close to human understanding yet fail in cases that are only predictable to the system designers may be frustrating to use. How will the tradeoff between increasing utility and increasing inscrutability pan out? Where is Powerset going to be on this hypothetical graph?

Uncanny Valley

As Fernando says, only testing on the final system will tell.

]]> http://eurekaman.com/is-there-an-uncanny-valley-for-natural-language-search/feed 2 That’s User Experience http://eurekaman.com/thats-user-experience http://eurekaman.com/thats-user-experience#comments Wed, 07 Mar 2007 03:45:30 +0000 Eureka Man http://eurekaman.com/thats-user-experience CD Baby



I had never shopped at CD Baby before. I had a fun time. Now they get a blog mention and a link out of it. Site designers take note.

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