Evri尝试公开内容连接

When Evri launched their content discovery engine in public beta last week, it drew criticism from some top-tier bloggers for not having enough content. That’s probably true — the site is in beta and right now has a pretty narrow topic focus — but that is also likely missing the point about what Evri is trying to accomplish. I talked to Evri CEO Neil Roseman earlier this week to get an insider’s view on the Seattle company’s goals.

当Evri上周在公开测试版中启动其内容发现引擎时，它引起了一些顶级博客作者的批评 ，因为他们没有足够的内容。 可能是正确的-该网站处于测试版，并且现在仅关注非常狭窄的主题-但这也可能缺少关于Evri想要完成的工作的要点。 我本周早些时候与Evri首席执行官尼尔·罗斯曼(Neil Roseman)进行了交谈，以了解内部人士对这家西雅图公司目标的看法。

Evri is a semantic discovery engine. Roseman told me that it is their view that search is no longer sufficient for digging through the sheer amount of information out there. While Roseman stressed that Evri isn’t trying to compete with search — search does its job well, he said, and there is no real value for the end user in adding natural language processing to search — he doesn’t think that search does an adequate job in exposing relationships between the entities in the content it finds.

Evri是语义发现引擎。 罗斯曼告诉我，他们认为搜索不再足以挖掘大量信息。 罗斯曼(Roseman)强调说，埃夫里(Evri)并没有试图与搜索竞争—搜索工作做得很好，他说，在将自然语言处理添加到搜索中对于最终用户没有真正的价值–他不认为搜索可以做到在揭示所找到内容中的实体之间的关系方面做得足够。

Rather than let users search for content, Evri uses natural language processing to try and make sense of content it finds and connect it, creating what the company calls the “data graph” of the web. The idea is something akin to the social graph that is exposed by sites like Facebook for our social connections, but applied to connections between entities mentioned in web content.

Evri并非让用户搜索内容，而是使用自然语言处理来尝试使所找到的内容有意义并进行连接，从而创建了公司所谓的网络“数据图”。 这个想法类似于社交图，它被Facebook之类的网站公开用于我们的社交关系，但应用于网络内容中提到的实体之间的联系。

For example, Evri might look at an article about Blythe Danner, figure out that she is an actress, and then connect her to Gwyneth Paltrow, allowing users to figure out that Danner is Paltrow’s mother. Roseman tells me that right now Evri understands the how and why of many of the connections that it has uncovered, but they have not yet figured out a good way to expose that information to users on the UI end.

例如，Evri可能会看有关Blythe Danner的文章，弄清楚她是一名女演员，然后将她与Gwyneth Paltrow联系起来，允许用户确定Danner是Paltrow的母亲。 Roseman告诉我，Evri现在了解它发现的许多连接的方式和原因 ，但是他们还没有找到在UI端向用户公开该信息的好方法。

Of course, as with most current NLP search or discovery engines, the technology doesn’t work perfectly. The engine never seems to know as much about a topic as a well informed human, but it can point users toward connections that algorithmic search engines might have a hard time exposing. And that’s essentially the current goal. Roseman hopes that users will perform searches as normal on other search engines, then come to Evri to dig deeper and find related information about topics they’re interested in. He even thinks that Evri pages might find there way into traditional search engine results.

当然，与大多数当前的NLP搜索或发现引擎一样，该技术不能完美运行。 该引擎似乎从来没有一个知识渊博的人知道那么多的话题，但是它可以使用户指向算法搜索引擎可能很难暴露的联系。 这实质上是当前的目标。 Roseman希望用户可以在其他搜索引擎上像往常一样执行搜索，然后到Evri进行更深入的挖掘，找到有关他们感兴趣的主题的相关信息。他甚至认为Evri页面可能会在传统搜索引擎结果中找到出路。

For now, Evri is building a destination site, with a focus on creating a simple and enjoyable user experience for exploring the connections its NLP engine finds. Ultimately, I get the impression that Evri hopes to be a back end technology where people build semantic search and discovery tools off the back of an API. Roseman tells me that the destination site they’re building will serve as a tech demo for developers — if users find value in what they’re creating, then developers will want in.

目前，Evri正在构建目标站点，重点是创建简单而愉快的用户体验，以探索其NLP引擎找到的连接。 最终，我给人的印象是Evri希望成为一种后端技术，使人们可以在API的后面构建语义搜索和发现工具。 罗斯曼(Roseman)告诉我，他们正在构建的目标站点将作为开发人员的技术演示-如果用户在他们所创建的内容中发现价值，那么开发人员就会想要。

There are definitely some exciting future prospects in that. The Evri search page, which provides a peek into how the back end NLP analysis sees connections, also provides a look at the type of research applications that could be made on the back of an eventual Evri API.

肯定会有令人兴奋的未来前景。 Evri搜索页面可窥视后端NLP分析如何看待连接，还可以查看可以在最终Evri API背面进行的研究应用程序的类型。

A search for “[Organization/Name] > acquire > [Organization/Name]” for example, pulls up a list of companies that Evri knows have acquired or bought out other organizations.

例如，通过搜索“ [组织/名称]>收购> [组织/名称]”，可以列出Evri知道已收购或收购其他组织的公司列表。

You’ll notice a bunch of repeats in the results, but this sort of thing hints at the type of research applications possible with NLP discovery engines. Queries exposing connections could have powerful research applications — such as figuring out how many times Gwyneth Paltrow has worn Vera Wang to an awards ceremony, or how often a specific politician has visited a certain state, or how many times a band has played in a specific city, etc.

您会注意到结果中有很多重复，但是这种事情暗示了NLP发现引擎可能进行的研究应用程序的类型。 公开联系的查询可能具有强大的研究应用程序，例如弄清楚格温妮丝·帕特洛(Gwyneth Paltrow)戴维拉·王(Vera Wang)参加颁奖典礼的次数，某个政客去过某个州的频率，或者某个乐队在某个特定国家/地区演奏了多少次。城市等

There is, however, a problem of scale. Right now Evri knows a good deal about politicians and celebrities, and Roseman tells me there are plans to expand the product’s field of knowledge to business, technology, health, and medicine. But adding that knowledge takes human power — creating and finding good seed lists, developing and curating ontologies, etc. The engine learns a lot on its own, but as I said earlier, I don’t think it will ever be as informed as a human expert on specific subjects. To expand Evri’s breadth of knowledge to cover all that Google can find might be impossible.

但是，存在规模问题。 目前，埃夫里(Evri)对政客和名人了解很多，罗斯曼(Roseman)告诉我，有计划将产品的知识领域扩展到商业，技术，健康和医学领域。 但是添加知识需要人力，包括创建和查找好的种子列表，开发和管理本体等等。引擎本身可以学到很多东西，但是正如我之前所说，我认为它永远不会像特定主题的人类专家。 要扩大Evri的知识范围以涵盖Google可以找到的所有内容，可能是不可能的。

There is also a potential problem of physical scale. Unlike keyword indexes, natural language ontologies are generally larger than the documents they index. Because, for example, NLP engines have to try to figure out every pronoun and who it refers to in a document, NLP ontologies are necessarily large. As the number of entities grows, there is exists potential scaling issues.

还有一个潜在的物理规模问题。 与关键字索引不同，自然语言本体通常大于它们所索引的文档。 例如，由于NLP引擎必须尝试找出每个代词及其在文档中所指的对象，因此NLP本体必然很大。 随着实体数量的增长，存在潜在的缩放问题。

结论 (Conclusion)

Far from disappointing, I found Evri intriguing. While the destination interface is kind of clumsy, and I don’t know that Evri will ever fly as a consumer destination site, I am excited at the eventual prospect of applications being developed on the back of the company’s natural language processing technology and index of connections.

埃夫里(Evri)并没有让我失望。 虽然目标界面有点笨拙，而且我不知道Evri会成为消费者目标站点，但我对公司在自然语言处理技术和索引的支持下开发应用程序的最终前景感到兴奋连接。

One smart thing that Evri is doing is offering widgets for bloggers that semantically analyze posts and point users to related content based on entities it finds in their writing. That will not only expose more people to Evri, but it will also bring more potential content into the engine.

Evri正在做的一件明智的事情是为博客作者提供小部件，这些小部件可以对帖子进行语义分析，并根据其在写作中发现的实体将用户指向相关内容。 这不仅会使更多人接触到Evri，还将为引擎带来更多潜在的内容。

翻译自: https://www.sitepoint.com/evri-attempts-to-expose-content-connections/