Logical Progression Engine

"Understanding" language means, amongst other things, knowing what concepts a word or phrase stands for and knowing how to link those concepts together in a meaningful way. It's ironic that natural language, the symbol system that is easiest for humans to learn and use, is hardest for a computer to master.

This quotation from the Microsoft website offers a glimpse of the complexities involved in designing one of the most complex tasks using a computer.

Athena - Introduction: Human Languages are very convoluted. The same words in different context can mean different things. For example, the word "cell" can mean different things to different people. It can mean a prison cell, compartment in a honeycomb, smallest organizational unit of a movement, a component of a battery, mobile phone or the smallest structural unit of an organism to name a few of the definitions. The surrounding words help to exact the true meaning of the word in relation to the context. In other words, you will have to decide the meaning of the phrase only after analyzing the entire sentence.

No computer software can write meaningful human language Poetry or Prose at this time. Amongst other things, they have difficulty understanding human emotions which form the basis of any serious literary pursuit. With that said, we turn our attention to using computers to understand the logical progression of our language which some call as Natural Language Processing. We have created a working model which can understand the subtlety of the language we speak - at least limited in context to health and medicine topics, with the few words, phrases you type into the box positioned here.

Let us say that you are searching for some information about Hemochromatosis, an inherited condition of excessive body accumulation of iron. When you type the word in the athena search box, the logical progression Engine gets to work. It decides that you are seeking information on the excess accumulation or over dosage of iron salts. Actually it may not have adequate information on hemochromatosis. But it looks up the logical extension of the word and supplies you with information related to iron overdose. This very innovative technique makes athena unique. The data from which it writes out the pages are not arranged in some random order. The entire data was meticulously researched,collected and edited by human editors. Thus the eventual pages churned out by Athena are lucid and written in chaste English language.

Origin of Athena: Originally for a very large database driven website, it was becoming an exercise in futility to make all those pages accessible to the search engines and human users alike. Besides, the convoluted URLs were so cumbersome that you need to be endowed with a photographic memory to remember them. To cut a long story short, the search engines just noticed the first page and ignored the rest - nearly a few hundred pages with good content.

This marked the beginning of the evolution of this rather remarkable ( you will see the reasons for calling Athena - remarkable soon enough) innovation - code-named as Athena.