Natural Language, a Solution Who’s Time Has Come
September 29, 2011
Editor’s Note: The Beyond Search team invited Craig Bassin, president of EasyAsk, a natural language processing specialist and search solution provider to provide his view of the market for next generation search systems. For more information about EasyAsk, navigate to www.easyask.com
This past February I watched, along with millions of others, IBM’s spectacular launch of Watson on Jeopardy! Watson was IBM’s crowning achievement in developing a Natural Language based solution finely tuned to compete, and win, on Jeopardy.
By IBM’s own estimates they invested between $1 and $2 billion to develop Watson. IBM ranks Watson as one of the 3 most difficult challenges in their long and successful history, along with spectacular accomplishments such as the Deep Blue chess program and the Blue Gene, Human Genome mapping program. Rarified air, indeed.
While many were watching to see if a computer could defeat human players my interests were different. Watson was about to introduce natural language solutions to the broader public and show the world that such solutions are truly the wave of the future.
The results were historic. Watson soundly defeated the human competitors. On the marketing side, IBM continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to tell the world that the time for natural language is now.
IBM is not the only firm to bring natural language processing (NLP) into the application mainstream:
- Microsoft acquired Powerset, a small company with strong NLP technology, to create Bing and compete head-on with Google,
- Yahoo, one of the original Internet search companies, found Bing compelling enough to strike an OEM agreement with Microsoft and make Bing Yahoo’s search solution,
- Apple acquired a linguistic natural language interface tool called Siri, which is now being incorporated into the Mac and iPhone operating systems,
- Oracle Corporation bought Inquira for its NLP-based customer support solution,
- RightNow Technologies similarly acquired Q-Go, a Dutch company also providing NLP-based customer support solutions.
Many companies are now positioning themselves as natural language tools and have expanded the once tight definition of NLP to include things such as analyzing text to understand intent or sentiment. This is the impact of Watson – it has put natural language into the mainstream and many organizations want to ride the marketing current driven by Watson regardless of closely aligned their technology is with Watson.
But let’s also look at Watson for what it really is – one of the most expensive custom solutions every built. Watson required an extremely large (and expensive) cluster of computers to run – 90 Power Server 750 systems, totaling 2,880 processor cores. It also required substantial R&D staff to build the analytics, content and natural language processing software stack. In fact, IBM didn’t come to Jeopardy, Jeopardy came to IBM. They replicated the Jeopardy set at IBM labs, placing a a great deal of horsepower underneath that stage.
The first foray of Watson into the real world will be in healthcare and the possibilities are exciting. Clearly IBM intends to focus Watson on some of the largest, most difficult challenges. But how does that help you run your business? You’re not going to see Watson running in your IT environment or on your preferred SaaS cloud anytime soon.
If Watson is focused on big problems, how can I use natural language solutions to better my business today? Perhaps you want to increase website customer conversion and user experience, better manage sales processes, deliver superior customer support, or in general, make it easier for your workers to find the right information to do their job. So where do you go?
That’s where EasyAsk comes in.
Protected: Setting Up Custom Access Controls in SharePoint Search
September 29, 2011
Fetch Rolls Out Live Access 4.1
September 28, 2011
With more and more data available through the web, documents and emails companies are seeking professionals to sort through all the junk and relay only the relevant data. The article, Fetch Technologies Unveils Breakthrough Web Data Extraction Capabilities and Reports Record Results, reports the newest version of one of the services which performs just such services as listed above.
According to its Web site: Fetch “…automatically aggregates, normalizes, and integrates online data into the system of your choice.” With an impressive list of clients from Dow Jones to Shopzilla, Fetch appears to be doing something right. As the article explains of the newest version:
Live Access 4.1 expands Fetch’s already robust capabilities in precision Web data extraction, enabling clients to easily collect, augment and transform data through all available APIs. In addition, Fetch clients can now extract data from Websites that employ AJAX and other dynamic content technologies. The release also offers access to completely new sources of data, including PDFs, Microsoft Office documents and images.
The benefit of a service such as Fetch’s is that it allows a company’s employees to spend their time on authentic work instead of wasted hours searching. One study estimates that one out of every ten hours worked is spent on searching for data with 35 percent of that time wasted as the information is never found.
Data management services are the logical answers. Fetch moves beyond the obvious need and offers data aggregation and uses the same technology to provide its clients efficient and fast background checks.
Content processing vendors are on a treadmill. As the volume of data available to businesses goes up, content processing systems have to enhance their offerings. With the volume of data in digital form expanding rapidly, we anticipate quicker and quicker system upgrade cycles. Shorter cycles impose significant challenges on vendors and licensees alike.
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
TrendSpottr and DataSift Team Up to Provide Predictive Insights to Social Media Consumers
September 28, 2011
DataSift and Endeca said their vows and now DataSift has another partner.
TrendSpottr, the popular web service for real-time trend analysis, and DataSift, a powerful real-time social media data filtering platform, announced this week that they will be teaming up to provide customers with early and predictive insights from their personalized, filtered streams. In other words they will be telling you what you don’t know before you need to know it… sort of.
The September 23 PR Web release TrendSpottr and DataSift Integrate Services to Provide Customers with Early and Predictive Trending Insights From Their Real-Time Data Streams states:
The DataSift platform filters 100 percent of the Twitter feed and other sources in real-time. This is delivered as enriched data with added augmentations, including sentiment analysis, geo- location and social influence amongst others, providing data of exceptional fidelity that is rich with information to mine for specific and valuable trends.
The release also quotes the founder and CEOs of both companies who appear very excited to be working together to improve enterprises, media companies and social media users access social data to gain real-time insights and market intelligence.
Three observations:
- Twitter content is a must have input for certain companies
- DataSift is one of the gateway vendors for the Twitter content so we expect more pursuit of DataSift
- The availability of large flows of data from the Twitter community requires significant investments in value adding software which can make sense of short, often cryptic and context free,messages.
We see a mini land rush building.
Jasmine Ashton, Sept 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
TEMIS Makes Open Source Play with Alfresco
September 28, 2011
Sharepoint 2010 users now have more options to data management thanks to the joining of Alfresco and TEMIS to create Luxid. MB Consulting reports about the new content enrichment tie up in TEMIS and Alfresco Reveal a Common Integration of Their Solutions.
The merging of one commercial firm with one mostly open source firm is presented in this way:
Deployed within the Alfresco Enterprise Luxid can directly access the documents to extract metadata using the power of the semantic analysis and complement the detection and extraction of metadata already proposed by Apache Tika ™. Once the semantic metadata extracted by Luxid ®, they are used by Alfresco Enterprise, to enrich the faceted search, allowing the recommendation of related content, building relationships with corporate databases, populate dashboards Business Intelligence or trigger business processes.
By teaming with TEMIS, an open-source technology Alfresco is shifting their marketing in an entirely new direction. With open source marketing the new trend for companies wishing success for their products, this blending of two proven winners and in their industry and open source technology is, it seems to me, mostly a marketing play. Let the customer pursuit begin.
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
IntelSoft Provides Data Management for Supply Chains
September 28, 2011
In the world of supply chains there are several programs a company can choose for their reporting needs. IntelSoft is one such program with an interesting new demo available. Campion PPS, the parent of IntelSoft, repeatedly describes the program as “Easy, Agile and Robust.”
The demo gives a walkthrough of the programming system and the many applications available at both the creation and end result. Live time reporting is just a click away and information can easily be added and deleted from reports and then distributed to the appropriate team members. The systems ease-of-use allows IT departments more time to focus on more important jobs than the drudgery most data management systems require.
Campian’s website describes IntelSoft’s solution as:
Increasingly, more and more detailed supply chain reports has become the norm, as has the need for real time solutions facilitating rapid drill down of information in order to achieve a more visible, efficient, and responsive supply chain structure…Modern BI solutions, such as IntelSoft Style Intelligence, can support these supply chain report needs for greater transparency across organizations and the desire for rapid, more detailed reporting requirements to aid decision making through all levels.
Data management is not limited to businesses dealing with massive amounts of written data to sort through. Companies such as supply chains also lose precious man hours searching and retrieving data. Programs such as IntelSoft are an ideal solution to that loss in productivity. As search and content processing vendors expand from the commodity arena of enterprise search, firms looking for new markets will have to offer benefits not provided by incumbents. Without benefits, pricing may become the way for a search vendor to attack certain vertical markets.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: SharePoint Profesionals: Are Customers Put First?
September 28, 2011
Vivisimo and Its High Score Search Plays
September 27, 2011
Vivisimo, the leader in information optimization, announced this week that Forrester Research, an independent research firm, gave them high scores in their report titled “Market Overview: Enterprise Search.” According to a PR Newswire article Vivisimo Earns Excellent Scores in All But Two Categories In Evaluation by Independent Research Firm Focused on Enterprise Search Market:
Vivisimo’s Velocity 8.0 platform was evaluated among 11 other competing vendor products with testing focusing on 10 distinct criteria, including: mobile support; federation model; indexing and connectivity; social and collaborative features; management and analysis; security; semantics/text analytics; interface flexibility; relevance model; and platform readiness. Scores for each criterion ranged from top to bottom: excellent; very good; good; fair; and poor. Following the conclusion of the evaluations Vivisimo was the only vendor to receive excellent scores in all but two judging criteria.
I’m glad to hear that Vivisimo delivers a high quality product. However, it would have been nice if the article stated what the two weaknesses were so that I could be aware of what they still need to improve upon. Our publisher’s new study—The New Landscape of Enterprise Search—identifies some “considerations” one may want to know about when selecting and enterprise search system. Also, don’t confuse The New Landscape with the azure chip consulting firm’s study which helpfully and quite originally uses the word “landscape” as well. Imitation is a form of flattery. Unimaginative, yes. Sincerest, no. Give everyone an “A” for effort.
Jasmine Ashton, September 27, 2011
Gmail: Two Views
September 27, 2011
I found two articles about Gmail interesting and mildly amusing. The notion of free email with scripts chugging away doing mysterious things is not for me. The first article asserts that I am a silly goose. Big surprise since I am a goose. That’s a snap of me in the Beyond Search logo. Who made the assertion? An azure chip consultant that’s who. Navigate to “Gmail now ‘Viable Alternative’ to Microsoft, says Gartner.” I used to know what percent of the commercial enterprises were using Gmail. I can’t recall the number but it was in single digits, but you can check the facts by asking Google. Here’s the key passage:
Cain said that apart from Exchange, Gmail is the only email package that has done well in the enterprise market recently, while others such as Novell GroupWise and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino have “lost market momentum”. But Google still has a way to go, the Gartner report said. Because Google focuses on features for the mass market, large organizations with complex requirements – such as financial institutions – have found Google is resistant to requests that would only apply to a few customers. “Banks, for example, may require surveillance capabilities that Google is unlikely to build into Gmail given the limited appeal,” the report said. Similarly, the report said large system integrators and enterprises report that Google’s lack of transparency in areas such as continuity, security and compliance can “thwart deeper relationships”.
I read this an find some fancy dancing, but there’s that single digit estimate of Gmail’s uptake. Hmmm.
The second article is “Lack of Transparency Scares Enterprise Off Google Mail.” Same source, the azure chip consultant. However, now the message is less than optimistic. Here’s the snippet I noted:
There are certain sectors where email is very sensitive that Google will not win over in the near future. That includes places like banks which really could do with stronger security and surveillance, not less of it, as Kweku Adoboli has proved. Gartner reckons Google isn’t willing to introduce that any time soon. More importantly, larger organizations, says Gartner, complain that Google isn’t transparent about what it does with your data. And that is a big problem.
Is this an example of curation with spin, honest misinterpretation, or masterful marketing? For Gartner, it is definitely marketing. For the critics, it is prudence.
Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Lexalytics Trains Your Computer!
September 27, 2011
Lexalytics competes in the realm of text analysis. Its Salience engine helps companies track what people are saying about their products on the internet. Seth Redmore, VP of Product Management at Lexalytics, talks sentiment analysis with David Cox in, “Train Your Computer, Monitor Your Brand Online Using Sentiment Analysis.”
Sentiment analysis is quite a task for a computer. Language is shaded with tone and intonation and the same line of written text can often mean two very different things. Redmore’s cites how internet buzz surrounding the BP oil spill was incorrectly interpreted as positive by computer systems. We learned:
When you looked at the content, the way it was being described was that it was the “biggest,” “largest” spill–not “worst.” That’s a hard thing to wrap your head around. I as a human know an oil spill is bad, but when a machine is interpreting it, from the perspective of the oil spill, things are good.
The field is not perfect yet, but Redmore sees exciting advances on the horizon. Wikipedia could be harnessed as a natural language tutorial for computer systems. In-person communicates will continue to be shaped by the technologies that make online or virtual communications possible. Keep an eye on Lexalytics for the newest advances in NLP and artificial intelligence. Oh, and as for training my computer, I am waiting. A combination of Watson and Salience might be an interesting combination for a TV game show demo too.
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 27, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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