Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1999

Powerful Chinese Search Engine Can Find a Needle in a Haystack MoLi & ANSeRS Attracts the Interest of IT Companies Worldwide What a Good Search Engine Can Do Nowadays, finding the information we need on the Internet means having to navigate through a sea of webpages using a search engine. A good search engine can boost the number of hits to a webpage as well as its economic value. Hence companies which develop such engines tend to keep them for their ow n use. Search engines u p for licensing are few i n the market. Even fewer are those designed for Chinese applications. The University's Mo L i & ANSeRS is exemplary of this kind of search engine. Features of MoLi & ANSeRS Developed by Prof. Wong Wing-shing of the Department of I n f o rma t i on Engineerin g and his former Ph.D. student Dr. Qin An , Mo L i & ANSeRS is a software platfor m for automated Chinese text analysis w i t h a search engine. Recipient of the Certificate of Merit in Consumer Product Design in the 1997 Ho ng Kong Awards for Industry, it has great appeal for companies interested i n exploring the c omme r c i a l p o t e n t i al o f Chinese I n t e r ne t applications. Its commercial possibilities ar e being tapped by IT companies dispersed throughout Hong Kong, mainland China, the US, and Europe, which have been licensed by the University to use the system. The system features a Chinese wo r d processing system and a network searching robot system. The former has the functions of automated segmentation and part-of-speech tagging needed for advanced text processing. The latter, using artificial intelligence, searches by topic rather than by wo rd o r phrase. For instance, if you search for 'real estate', ordinary search engines w i l l list webpages w i t h both or either of the Chinese characters for 'rea l estate' whereas Mo Li & ANSeRS w i ll list webpages on related topics such as 'buildings', 'property', arranged in order of relevance. From Basic Research to Downstream Development Mo L i & ANSeRS may be a shining star in the IT field but Prof. Won g said that he and Dr. Qin were 'passive' at first when it came to transferring their brainchild to industry. Prof. Wong said his interest and motivation lay i n the exploration of academic theories, and n o t the t a p p i n g of c omme r c i al possibilities of his creation. Academic research and downstream development are two different things, 6