Wolfram Alpha - Overview

Overview

Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram Alpha then computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of curated, structured data that come from other sites. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one.

Using the Mathematica toolkit, Wolfram Alpha can respond to natural language questions and generate a human-readable answer. Wolfram has said of the engine:

"All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do,"

Wolfram Alpha can only provide robust query results based on computational facts, not queries on the social sciences, cultural studies or even many questions about history where responses require more subtlety and complexity. It is capable of responding to particularly phrased natural-language fact-based questions such as "Where was Mary Robinson born?" or more complex questions such as "How old was Queen Elizabeth II in 1974?" It displays its "Input interpretation" of such a question, using standardized phrases such as "age | of Queen Elizabeth II (royalty) | in 1974", the answer of which is "Age at start of 1974: 47 years", and a biography link. Wolfram Alpha does not answer queries which require a narrative response such as "What is the difference between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars?" but will answer factual or computational questions such as "June 1 in Julian calendar".

Mathematical symbolism can be parsed by the engine, which typically responds with more than the numerical results. For example, "lim(x->0) sin x/x" yields the expected result, 1, as well as a possible derivation using L'Hôpital's rule, a plot, and the series expansion. It is also able to perform calculations on data using more than one source. For example, "What is the fifty-second smallest country by GDP per capita?" yields Nicaragua, $1160 per year.