MSN Search Engine Uses Basis Technology for Natural Language Processing
Basis Technology announced this week that Microsoft Corp. has chosen the Rosette Linguistics Platform to support Web searches in its new MSN search engine. The companies have entered into a multi-year agreement in which Microsoft has the option to utilize all of Basis Technology’s linguistics software, including components for language identification, morphological analysis, and entity extraction.
“MSN Search aims to deliver fast, relevant search results to consumers all over the world,” said Justin Osmer, product manager for MSN Search. “We are happy to work closely with Basis Technology because of their long and distinguished track record in supporting multilingual search.”
On Nov. 11, 2004, MSN released a global beta of the improved MSN Search service worldwide. The new MSN Search delivers the information consumers are looking for online faster through a combination of up-to-date resources and search tools that make it possible for consumers to tailor search to their needs.
Rosette performs linguistic analysis that helps information retrieval applications understand search queries. For example, Rosette identifies individual words for languages such as Japanese that do not use spaces between words, breaks compound words into their individual components, and identifies parts-of-speech such as verb, adjective, etc. This information increases the accuracy of search results.
The Rosette Linguistics Platform uses state of the art Natural Language Processing techniques to improve information retrieval, text mining and other applications and apply them to global markets. Rosette provides capabilities like identifying the language of incoming text, providing a normalized representation in Unicode, and locating names, places and other key concepts.
