F.T.C. stays deadlocked on Microsoft; antitrust charges remain unresolved

Article Abstract:

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is reportedly still deadlocked over whether to bring a civil complaint against microcomputer software giant Microsoft Corp for unfair trade practices before an administrative law judge. The FTC met for over three hours Jul 21, 1993, to try to break a similar deadlock reached in Feb, when FTC Chmn Janet Steiger and Commissioner Dennis Yao reportedly voted for, and Commissioners Debra Owen and Mary Azcuenaga against, proceeding on the matter. The FTC is also thought to be split over whether to close the investigation, which centers on allegations that Microsoft designed its industry-dominant software to be incompatible with competing products, or refer it to the Justice Dept for additional inquiry. FTC spokesperson Donald Elder refused to discuss or even acknowledge the investigation. A frustrated Novell Inc announced that it may file a civil antitrust suit of its own against arch-rival Microsoft.

Investigations, United States. Federal Trade Commission, Restraint of trade, Investigation

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Trying to program common sense

Article Abstract:

Computational linguist Karen Jensen leads a Microsoft Corp team working to develop software that enables computers to understand natural-language sentences using dictionary information alone. While researchers have previously considered teaching computers a little common sense to be the key to developing their linguistic understanding, Jensen's team thinks an approach based purely on syntactical rules and dictionary knowledge can do more to advance their language-processing capabilities in the near term. The team's software makes three passes over a sentence to understand it: the first to analyze its syntactical form, the second to draw semantic conclusions based on the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the last to piece together the sentence's logical structure. Microsoft Word general Mgr Chris Peters expects the team's research to result in the first fully functional grammar checker.

Research, Industrial research, Research and Development, Natural language processing, Natural Language Interfaces, Language Analysis, Common-Sense Reasoning, Dictionary, Computational linguistics

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