Zaiqing Nie of the Web Search & Mining Group at Microsoft Research Asia is demonstrating a project called EntityCube, an English-language version of a wildly popular Chinese project called Renlifang.

In Mandarin, "renlifang" means "three people." The nomenclature is intentional, because the project, and its EntityCube manifestation, is all about demarcating the relationships among a group of people.

"EntityCube automatically summarizes relevant information about people," Nie explains. "For example, here, we've summarized the search results for Bill Gates. You can see that Steve Ballmer is here, IT leaders, celebrities. [He clicks on the Ballmer icon.] You can also have a Web page just for Steve Ballmer. We find all related people, the type of related people, news about him.

"The important part is that we automatically generate this. It's not manual. You can see much of this information on the Web, but human beings do that work. Our input is Web pages. The output is this summarization page and this social graph."

The EntityCube project site offers a good explanation of the technology:

"The need for collecting and understanding Web information about a real-world entity (such as a person or a product) currently is fulfilled manually through search engines. But the information about a single entity might appear in thousands of Web pages. Even if a search engine could find all the relevant Web pages about an entity, the user would need to sift through all the pages to get a complete view of the entity. EntityCube is an entity search and summarization system that efficiently generates summaries of Web entities from billions of crawled Web pages. The summarized information is used to build an object-level search engine about people, locations, and organizations and explore their relationships."

The value in such an approach is confirmed by its embrace by the Chinese public. The project page goes on to note: "Renlifang has been well received by Chinese Internet users and mainstream media in China, with positive comments and millions of page-views during peak days."

Such a reception validates the extensive effort the project has required.

"We've been working on this technology, object-level search, for five years," Nie says. "We got very positive feedback from the Chinese version. Renlifang is very popular right now. People like this idea of mining these results and integrating the search. Renlifang and EntityCube are the first time these mining techniques have been combined with search, and as far as scale and functionality, we are the best."

And the technology is not limited to the human domain. Other entities can be searched and summarized, as well. 

The next step for Nie and colleagues is to continue collecting feedback and refining the approach. The interest spawned by the TechFest demo can only help.

"We are trying to release research surveys that invite people to use it and provide feedback," Nie says. "From our feedback today and yesterday, we've found that English speakers also like this idea a lot."