Linguamatics Revealed
July 25, 2011
David Milward, CTO of Linguamatics sat down with The Inquirer for an in-depth look at the10 year old British company’s founder. Dr. Milward insists that it’s not hart to explain what Linguamatics is all about. The write up reported Dr. Milward as saying:
“Its software extracts knowledge from unstructured text. What’s difficult is to explain why it’s different. Isn’t that what a search engine does?”
Linguamatics is individual in that traditional searches are not very ‘agile,’ you have to program specifically what you want. With his system, you can ask any question and get relevant returns.
Milward and partner Roger Hale have taken text mining to another level with the development of the Linguamatics company. Dr. Milward said:
“Organizations are becoming more and more knowledge-driven,” he says. “Similarly to scientific discovery, they build new things based on existing knowledge.”
Automation is important in the fast paced world of enterprise. Pharmaceutical companies are just one of the knowledge driven arenas that have adopted Milwards approach to business intelligence. He demonstrated the advancements of his technology in the last election when he mined Twitter reactions. We learned:
“We found that although people don’t use fully grammatical sentences, they do use grammatical constructions.” The relatively few linguistic patterns enabled them to identify what was being said.
Linguistic structure varies with the various operations and field’s humans are involved in, as do the words we use. Dr. Milward added:
“We found that although people don’t use fully grammatical sentences, they do use grammatical constructions.” The relatively few linguistic patterns enabled them to identify what was being said.
Milward said his system can see the relationship between them all. For example his system can take the words: carcinoma, tumor and neoplasm and equate it with “cancer.” He said:
“The result is the ability to ask a question like, “What genes are associated with breast cancer?” and get back a list of genes rather than a list of documents.”
That’s pretty cool, for a system that doesn’t have a human’s rationality or ability to grow and think. Linguamatics maintains that it’s not trying to replace the human element within the process. They are simply trying to aid in the development so that a job can be done more effectively and in a shorter amount of time.
What this means to the business world is that you will be able to find companies and concepts that are linked in documents without having to pour over the results for hours on end. It will save time and in turn, will save money. Another key pint was:
“There are 20 million relevant articles in the biological domain,” says Milward. “And if you’re going into social media, for example, there are one billion tweets a week. It’s huge amounts of information and what we’re trying to do typically is pull out bits of information from that.”
While in theory Linguamatics has the ability to be a useful tool that can be utilized for the greater good, there are some barriers that it will have to overcome first. The challenge of accessibility is a big one. They have yet to find a graphical interface that can create queries that all computers understand. Let’s face it, even in this age of technology, not everyone is a programmer and knows ‘techspeak.’ All in all, it’s a promising technology and something to keep an eye on. The start-up is only ten years old and has plenty of room to grow this into something big.
Stephen E Arnold, July 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search.
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