![\"College](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/02\/170201_web-Susan_Dumais_0123.jpg\")
<\/a>College Key Distinguished Alumna in Residence Susan Dumais ’75 gives a talk on Feb. 1 in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall in front of an image showing a bygone way to retrieve information: the card catalog. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n
Back in the 1980s, when Dumais was at Bell Labs, one ongoing project was to get a computer to recognize correctly whether \u201cyes\u201d or \u201cno\u201d was answered to the question, \u201cWill you accept this collect call?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYears and years and years of work went into that,\u201d Dumais says. The project did succeed in the 1990s (though collect calls are going the way of the typewriter).<\/p>\n
So, what makes today\u2019s \u201cnew\u201d technology possible? She points to better computational models, more computational horsepower, and access to much richer data.<\/p>\n
In the case of voice recognition, it means access to vast amounts of spoken language with corresponding transcriptions, which makes it \u201ceasier to map various acoustic features to the resulting words,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo when you search for ‘Who is the best teacher?’ the results include pages that use the word ‘professor’ even if they don’t use the word ‘teacher.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Another old idea whose time has come belongs to Dumais herself. In 1990 \u2014 way before Google or Bing \u2014 she and fellow researchers developed an information retrieval process known as \u201clatent semantic indexing.\u201d In recent years, LSI-related ideas have “been a big splash,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s because LSI enables search engines to retrieve the information that we\u2019re actually looking for. \u201cSo when you search for ‘Who is the best teacher?’ the results include pages that use the word ‘professor’ even if they don’t use the word ‘teacher,’ ” Dumais explains.<\/p>\n