This was the fastest beta invite confirmation ever. Unfortunately, Digger’s Terms of Service do not allow any sort of disclosure about features or results from it. This is very different from Powerset which has been going out of its way to get beta subscribers (even unconfirmed ones) to know what they are doing. Digger does not even seem to have a blog, which contradicts the rules for a web2.0 company.

Powerset hasn’t even started competing with Google yet and already it has its own competitor. [Powerset hasn’t even started competing with Google yet and already it has its own competitor. ]1 - which is currently in private beta - does sense disambiguation of the search terms like everybody else. Unlike everybody else, however, they expose the underlying WordNet definitions to the searcher and allow them to pick, rate and even discuss the senses a la Digg or maybe Search Wikia concept.

I found another online syntax tree visualiser that can cope with large trees - phpSyntaxTree. It requires square brackets instead of the lisp s-expression ones, but it should not be too hard to convert from one to another. There is also a Ruby version of the application from a different developer, but it refused to display one of my large sentences that the original had no problems with. The result of the parse is an image and is fairly easy to read with the leaves (words) laid out in strata (stratas?

Are you a regular yet not subscribed reader of this blog? Would you like to subscribe, but haven’t figured out how? I apologise. I have received an email asking how to subscribe to my blog via email. That made me think about subscribers in general and that maybe some of you may be stuck reading this (not-really-periodic) blog the hard way. If you do, maybe this post will help you (and me) to solve this problem.

In my review of WordChamp and LingQ I mentioned that an ideal language learning system would have deep support for the specifics of the learner’s target language. I was asked to clarify what I mean by that. I have now found an example of what could be a step in the right direction. It is an online research system called WERTi from the Computational Linguistics and Language Technology group at The Ohio State University.