BE: A Search Engine For NLP Research

Many modern natural language-processing applications utilize search engines to locate large numbers of Web documents or to compute statistics over the Web corpus. Yet Web search engines are designed and optimized for simple human queries—they are not well suited to support such applications. As a result, these applications are forced to issue millions of successive queries resulting in unnecessary search engine load and in slow applications with limited scalability. In response, we have designed the Bindings Engine (BE), which supports queries containing typed variables and string-processing functions (Cafarella and Etzioni, 2005). For example, in response to the query “powerful 〈noun〉” BE will return all the nouns in its index that immediately follow the word “powerful”, sorted by frequency. (Figure 1 shows several possible BE queries.) In response to the query “Cities such as ProperNoun(Head(〈NounPhrase〉))”, BE will return a list of proper nouns likely to be city names.