Bitext’s Antonio S. Valderrábanos Interviewed
April 14, 2008
You may not be familiar with Bitext, a search and content processing vendor specializing in natural language processing or NLP. The company has found an appetite for its technology in Spain and in other European countries. The company recently landed a deal to provide search and content processing technology to support a new citizen-facing information service in Spain. Dubbed Red 060, this system will be similar to the US government’s service, USA.gov. The company also is working with US search vendor dtSearch.
Antonio Valderrábanos, founder of Bitext in Madrid, Spain, told Beyond Search:
Our goal is to complement search engines, giving them the ability to handle text according to its content, rather than its form as it happens in most applications, including search engines. We are interested in all forms of search, including search in databases or Geographical Information Systems.
Unlike some vendors, the Bitext system meshes with other vendors’ systems, adding important new functionality. Mr. Valderrábanos told Beyond Search:
Our approach is to say, “Okay, you have a perfectly good key word indexing system. We add value to that system in ways that make users happier and without getting rid of the system in which you have invested significant time and money.” We integrate, complement, turbo-charge.
Bitext is working on important enhancements to the company’s content processing functions, including entity extraction. Entity extraction identifies people, places, events, and certain numerical data in a source document.
Looking farther into the future, Bitext engineers are working on new ways to make access easy and intuitive. Mr. Valderrábanos observed:
I think the future will want one single interface to different information sources, whether documents or databases or some combination of data from many different systems. be them docs or databases or hybrid.
Of course, the interface will be natural language, the simplest most effective way of communicating for human. We will certainly not want to bother with different applications and formal languages–so no key word queries, Boolean statement, SQL strings, or forms. People want to get the information they need without hurdles.
The full interview with Mr. Valderrábanos appears on the ArnoldIT.com Web site as part of the “Search Wizards Speak” series. You can learn more about Bitext’s line of products on the Bitext Web site.
Stephen Arnold, April 14, 2008
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