halo-20030527
- http://www.projecthalo.com halo-20030527 Project Halo is a staged research effort by Vulcan Inc. towards the development of a Digital Aristotle, an application capable of producing user and domain-appropriate answers and justifications to novel (previously unseen) questions in an ever-growing number of domains. The Digital Aristotle will differentiate itself from current search engine technology in a number of important ways. First, search engines require that a specific text containing the answer to a users query reside somewhere in the searched corpus. Next, the document containing the correct answer must reside fairly high among the ranked lists of documents it returns given the users specified keywords. And finally, the user needs to scan each document for the appropriate passage. Since the Digital Aristotle generates custom answers to every question, it is capable of answering questions for which text currently does not exist in some document. By returning that answer to the user it eliminates the extra steps of producing ranked lists of documents and their subsequent scanning. The Digital Aristotles ability to produce user and domain appropriate justifications will promote the end user s trust that the answers generated by the application are indeed correct.