Digital Reasoning Garners Patent for Groundbreaking Invention

March 16, 2011

There are outfits in the patent fence business. Google, Hitachi, and IBM come to my mind. The patent applications are interesting because they provide a window through which one can gaze at some of the thinking of the firm’s legal, engineering and management professionals.

Then there are outfits who come up with useful and novel systems and methods. The Digital Reasoning patent US7882055, “Knowledge Discovery Agent System and Method”, granted on February 1, 2011, falls into this category. The patent application was filed in July 2007, so it took the ever efficient USPTO about 48 months to figure out what struck me when I first read the application. But the USPTO makes its living with dogged thoroughness. I supplement my retirement income by tracking and following really smart people like Tim Estes. I make my judgments about search and content processing based on my experience, knowledge of what other outfits have claimed as a unique system and method, and talking with the inventor. You can read two of my conversations with Tim Estes in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak series. The link to my 2010 interview and my 2011 interview are at www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak. (I did an interview with a remarkable engineer, Abe Music, at Digital Reasoning here.) Keep in mind that I was able to convert my dogging of this company to a small project this year. Hooray!

The guts of the invention are:

A system and method for processing information in unstructured or structured form, comprising a computer running in a distributed network with one or more data agents. Associations of natural language artifacts may be learned from natural language artifacts in unstructured data sources and semantic and syntactic relationship may be learned in structured data sources, using grouping based on a criteria of shared features that are dynamically determined without the use of a priori classifications, by employing conditional probability constraints.

I learned from my contacts at Digital Reasoning:

The pioneering invention entails intelligent software agents that extract meaning from text as humans do – by analyzing concepts and entities in context. The software learns as it runs, continually comparing new text to existing knowledge. Associated entities and synonym relationships are automatically discovered and relevant documents are identified from across extremely large corpora.
The patent specifically covers the mechanism of measurement and the applications of algorithms to develop machine-understandable structures from patterns of symbol usage. In addition, it covers the semantic alignment of those learned structures from unstructured data with pre-existing structured data – a necessary step in creating enterprise-class entity-oriented systems. The technology as implemented in Synthesys (TM)? provides a unique and now protected means of bringing automated understanding to end users in the
enterprise and beyond.

So what’s this mean?

The Traditional Method	The Digital Reasoning Method

In financial analysis, health information, and intelligence applications which do you want to you and your colleagues to use? I go for the Veyron. The 1998 Mustang is great as a back up or knock about. The Veyron means business in my opinion.

Three points:

This is a true “beyond text” system and method. Key word search and 1998-type methods cannot deliver Synthesys 3.0 (TM) functionality
Users don’t want laundry lists. The invention delivers actionable information. The value of the method is proven each day in certain very important applications which involve the top concerns of Maslow’s hierarchy
The system can make use of human inputs but can operate in automatic mode. Many systems include automatic functions, but the method invented by Mr. Estes is a new one. Think of the difference in performance between a 1998 Mustang and the new Bugatti Veyron. Both are automobiles, but there is a difference in state of the art a long time ago and state of the art now.

If you want more information about Digital Reasoning, the company’s Web site is www.digitalreasoning.com.

Stephen E Arnold, March 15, 2011

Freebie but I want a T shirt from Music Row in Nashville

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Financial, Indexing, News, Semantic, Technology, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.