A wireless natural language search engine Jochen L. Leidner   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Tutorials Abstract Web search using stationary (desktop) computers has become a pervasive activity. The mobile user in need of information, however, faces several problems in his or her quest to satisfy an information need. Mobile devices have small displays, and mobile user interfaces are often less then usable, because they impose the desktop Web search paradigm on the mobile user. We present a wireless search engine based on natural language queries transmitted via popular Small Message Service (SMS) text messages. Besides traditional keyword based queries, the system can accept questions or phrases and returns responses that contain likely answers (Figure 1) instead of traditional lists of hyperlinks. The additional precision gained from performing a linguistic analysis of the query helps extracting answers from Web pages directly, which requires no navigation. The system is implemented using a NLIR system residing on a server, which can translate questions or phrases into search engine queries or queries to SOAP Web services, where a gateway mediates between the mobile network and the Internet (Figure 2). Whereas on the desktop keyboard-based search still prevails, we find that in a mobile context question answering techniques can help overcome the output constraints. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery