Xerox Creates Search Text Mining Solution

Xerox Creates Search Text Mining Solution

Grenoble, France -June 22, 2007 - Researchers at Xerox Corporation have unveiled FactSpotter, a new document search software developed to recognize more on-target search terms. The new Xerox text mining software, is designed to surpass traditional keywords, to deliver more relevant information.

Developed in Grenoble, France, by researchers at the Xerox Research Centre Europe, the new text mining software combines a powerful linguistic engine with an easy-to-use interface so that anyone can query the system in everyday language. Unlike traditional enterprise search tools, FactSpotter looks not only for the keywords contained in a query but also the context of the document those words contain. The ''smart'' search engine can comb through almost any document regardless of the language, location, format or type; take advantage of the way humans think, speak and ask questions; and discriminate the results highlighting just a handful of relevant answers instead of returning thousands of unrelated responses.

Frederique Segond, Manager of parsing and semantics research at XRCE explained, ''Our advanced search engine goes beyond today's typical 'keyword' search or current data-mining programs, which typically end up searching only 40 percent of all the documents that are relevant because the keywords are too limiting. Xerox's tool is more accurate because it delves into documents, extracting the concepts and the relationships among them. By understanding the context, it returns the right information to the searcher, and it even highlights the exact location of the answer within the document.''

FactSpotter is part of Xerox's ongoing intelligent document technology research that complements its growing portfolio of services-related innovations. The technology helps customers better manage data and document-intensive work processes in industries like banking, finance and legal. Xerox plans to launch FactSpotter next year as part of its Xerox Litigation Services offerings, which include electronic discovery (e-discovery) services that primarily support legal and regulatory compliance.

Mike Maziarka, Director of InfoTrends Dynamic Content Software and Image Scanning Trends Consulting Services added, ''Today's knowledge worker has quite a task in front of them. Each and every day they search for specific data, information, or corporate knowledge in order to do their job well. We all need tools that will make it easier to search for that needle among the 'haystack' of masses of information that exist in our world today. FactSpotter meets this need because it can make searches easier to conduct, more accurate, and more encompassing. This ultimately improves the focus of the results and allows workers to be more productive.''

The new software goes beyond traditional search engines in several ways:

• FactSpotter's novel interface means users can express their queries naturally instead of forcing them to adapt their questions to the logic of computers. Traditional systems, on the other hand, split a query into isolated words and return only documents that contain exactly those words.
• Unlike traditional search engines that return the entire document forcing the user to find the relevant information manually, FactSpotter returns the specific portion of a search document that is relevant to the query.
• FactSpotter takes into account the context of the entire document instead of just a cluster of nearby words. It introduces the concept of relation, searching within and across sentences and paragraphs.
• FactSpotter recognizes abstract concepts, like ''people'' or ''building,'' and will retrieve all the words that fit within that category.