DollarDays Seeing Success With EasyAsk
September 6, 2011
An Expert System Flash Report
Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter about EasyAsk’s innovative natural language analysis-commerce search software. In June, EasyAsk partnered with the social networking giant Facebook to allow users to search and purchase products without having to ever leave the confines of Facebook’s familiar interface. Now, EasyAsk customer DollarDays International, one of the premier online wholesaler and closeout companies, is talking about the success they are having with the EasyAsk eCommerce Edition solution.
DollarDays selected the EasyAsk eCommerce Edition, the industry’s leading e-commerce search and merchandising solution to help increase conversion rates, deliver a better customer experience and give its marketing team a more agile merchandising capability. The EasyAsk natural language technology (NLP) provided a more powerful, yet easier to use search and merchandising for their e-commerce site which distributes over 140,000 products with over 5,000 categories and sub-categories.
DollarDays President and CEO Marc Joseph stated in a September news release entitled, Dollar Days Rings Up E-Commerce Dollars Using EasyAsk Natural Language Search and Merchandising:
The most successful e-commerce sites get the customer to the right products the fastest, speeding the buying process. EasyAsk natural language search allows our customers to find the exact product in a single click, increasing our customer conversion rates. EasyAsk also makes our merchandising more agile, which is essential in our business where product offerings are continuously changing.
Online retailers like DollarDays are recognizing the fact that in order to stay ahead of their competition their products must be as accessible to their customer base as possible. EasyAsk software products go far beyond traditional keyword search, allowing users to express searches in a highly descriptive way; for example:
blue mens polo shirts under $50
The EasyAsk system then delivers on point results. Our research suggests that the more quickly the customer gets to the products he/she wants, the more likely the customer is to purchase. Improving customer conversion is one of the key benefits of the EasyAsk approach in my opinion.
My take is that EasyAsk appears to be gaining momentum as they continue to adapt its e-commerce search and merchandising software to meet the needs of the various companies they serve. EasyAsk offers versions of its patented system which both in a SaaS (software as a service or hosted) environment and as an on premises installation. The architecture of the EasyAsk NLP and e-commerce system allows an EasyAsk customer to to switch easily between the two implementations if the client’s needs change.
EasyAsk works with virtually all of the leading e-commerce platform software. EasyAsk’s system now supports all three commerce channels: the Web, mobile and Facebook. At this time, EasyAsk may be one of the few if not the only e-commerce vendor able to support each of these three options. The result? EasyAsk gives its licensees a powerful solution and options which help enhance return on investment.
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
NLP, Just What the Doctor Ordered
September 2, 2011
The article, Natural Language Processing Best for EMR Data, on Nurse.com, explains how a new study utilizing natural language processing (NLP) showed an increase in identifying patient safety concerns.
The information reviewed was vast (almost 3,000 patients) and covered 20 measures of “potential adverse effects during hospitalization” including renal failure and pneumonia. By using NLP, the hospital system was able to get fast and accurate information. The article quotes the authors of the study as explaining the benefits of NLP as,
’The development of automated approaches, such as natural language processing, that extract specific medical concepts from textual medical documents that do not rely on discharge codes offers a powerful alternative to either unreliable administrative data or labor-intensive, expensive manual chart reviews.’
The project was a success with NLP offering much more reliable data percentages in all categories of patient safety. The article hypothesizes on the potential of the technology identifying patients ‘at risk’ upon entering the hospital.
This report is impressive and there is no doubt that NLP can help hospitals sort through their mounds of data, but that doesn’t mean that NLP is the answer to all data problems. Hospitals are unique in many ways and their data tends to be very factual. For analysis of that nature, NLP can be very helpful. But to assume it can help all industries is naïve.
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
EasyAsk Sweetens Sugar CRM
August 31, 2011
The world of customer relationship management (CRM) just got a lot sweeter a few months ago with the announcement that Sugar CRM is partnering with EasyAsk. SugarCRM is a leader in the world of customer relationship management. SugarCRM said:
SugarCRM helps your business communicate with prospects, share sales information, close deals and keep customers happy. SugarCRM is an affordable web-based CRM solution for small- and medium-sized businesses. Offered in the Cloud or on-site, it is easy to customize and adapt to the way you do business.
“EasyAsk and SugarCRM to Provide Natural Language Search and Analysis,” covers the news of this exciting joint venture. We learned:
EasyAsk and SugarCRM announced . . . at SugarCon 2011 that they will team up to offer EasyAsk for SugarCRM, a new version of EasyAsk with natural search and analysis software integrated with SugarCRM. The integrated product will deliver SugarCRM information through EasyAsk’s language interface and tools. With EasyAsk for SugarCRM, users can ask questions in English and get immediate answers FROM THEIR SugarCRM system.
The natural language processing (NLP) offered by EasyAsk allows users to query and communicate in English, smoothing the language barrier between man and machine. EasyAsk’s NLP technology and engineering really move the SugarCRM cloud offerings to the next level.
We are glad to see such a natural partnership taking place between two innovators. Other businesses, especially those in eCommerce and mobile apps, would do well to incorporate the EasyAsk language interface and tools into their offerings. Doing so would most certainly increase user satisfaction and reduce their own engineering and design stress.
Other independent software vendors have embedded the EasyAsk natural language interface into their offerings with considerable success. Among the companies using EasyAsk’s NLP technology are Siemens, Personnel Data Systems, Ceridian, and Gensource.
Although IBM has been intent on wowing the consumer with the Jeopardy game show demonstration, EasyAsk has been building a market for real-world natural language solutions. In addition, EasyAsk has also delivered a version of its NLP tools on NetSuite, one of the leaders in software as a service enterprise resource planning solution providers.
The EasyAsk-SugarCRM partnership came together smoothly, with both firms able to sweeten their product offerings while solving problems for licensees. We will continue to cover EasyAsk. We think the search firm will continue to prove itself a market and technology leader.
Stephen E Arnold, August 31, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
MIIAtech Unveils NLP Processing Platform
August 26, 2011
MIIAtech, to a new player in the world of search and analysis software, is making its market debut at CRM Evolution in New York City. The press release, “MIIAtech, a Search and Analysis Software Company, Unveils Enterprise Software Platform at CRM Evolution,” explains more.
Tautona broadly addresses the problem of information overload and inadequate searches that hamper large organizations . . . Tautona is able to search voluminous databases filled with structured and unstructured information by understanding the meaning of both the request and the stored information. The platform is fully cross-lingual, allowing questions to be asked in one language while the search is conducted in another or multi-language database (e.g. Chinese; Russian; and/or French). The answer is returned in the originating language.
The market has not had time to vet this new product, but if the price is right there will be customers who give it a try. The NLP market is getting more and more competitive, as firms and companies understand that the future of data is heading out of the structured realm and into the unknown. Stay tuned for the success of MIIAtech and Tautona.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 26, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
EasyAsk Enhances User Experience in Mobile Apps
August 24, 2011
EasyAsk is a company that leverages its incorporation of natural language processing in order to boost its information retrieval technology. EasyAsk offers an alternative to traditional enterprise search and is having a strong impact on eCommerce as it relates to “findability.” The company told us:
Founded in 1999 by Dr. Larry Harris, a computational linguistics professor and internationally recognized expert on database systems and computerized natural language. EasyAsk technology is used today by leading retailers, manufacturers, financial services institutions, government agencies and pharmaceutical and health care organizations around the globe.
Mobile commerce is the undeniable way of the future and EasyAsk is shaping how it will look. John Morell, VP of Product Marketing, wrote “Mobile Apps and User Experience” for the company blog, addressing how navigation and search must be treated differently in the mobile context. He spoke to some of the considerations made when developing EasyAsk eCommerce mobile. We learned:
The screen real estate on a mobile browser is vastly smaller than that on a PC or Mac. This says that excellent search is critical. You need to pinpoint search results because wading through pages of results in a mobile browser would frustrate a user and cause them to abandon. But excellent navigation is also important due to the screen real estate constraints. Using richer, dynamic search criteria in the navigation, such as product attributes . . . allows visitors to find products in 1 to 2 clicks, rather than plowing through pages of categories – increasing the chances of conversion.
Other vendors, such as X1, are pushing into this territory as well. However, EasyAsk has a definite edge in its tested usage of natural language processing. An “Interview with Craig Bassin,” EasyAsk CEO, is a good reference for how the company got its start and why it can currently stand toe-to-toe with others in the field like Endeca. Mr. Bassin said:
EasyAsk’s unique natural language technology helps people find information faster and easier by enabling them to perform e-commerce searches or enterprise data searches in plain English, making it easier for users to express what they want and delivering a more accurate answer. The technology is used in two products: EasyAsk eCommerce Edition, an e-commerce search and merchandising solution that has proven to drive the best buyer conversion rates in the industry, and EasyAsk Business Edition which offers the easiest, most intuitive manner to search and explore corporate data.
EasyAsk is proven in the market, but it is not stuck in the success of its past. Continuing to innovate, the company looks for new ways to improve not only user experience, but also client satisfaction. EasyAsk and its natural language processing looks good to me.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
ReVerb: The Whole Language Movement
August 12, 2011
Reverb, a new search method, presents an optimistic future for search engines and intelligence levels. Projecting what Web search engines will look like in ten years, ReVerb should hope that the whole language movement doesn’t make a comeback in schools. Requiring users to input an “argument” and a “predicate,” this program automatically identifies and extracts binary relationships from English sentences—and requires users to know the basic parts of a sentence.
Created by the University of Washington’s Turing Center, as a part of the KnowItAll project, there are currently 15 million Reverb extractions available for academic use. This program has blown similar ones out of the water.
The paper entitled, “Identifying Relations for Open Information Extraction” asserts the following:
“[ReVerb] more than doubles the area under the precision-recall curve relative to previous extractors such as TextRunner and WOE-pos. More than 30% of ReVerb’s extractions are at precision 0.8 or higher— compared to virtually none for earlier systems.”
The creators are confident that ReVerb will be useful for queries where target relations cannot be specified in advance and speed is important. Currently, there is a demo available.
Is this the next big thing in search or another public relations push? Will this generate sympathetic vibrations within the Google?
Megan Feil, August 11, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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.
New CTO at InQuira
April 16, 2011
Updated: April 18, 2011, 7 10 pm Eastern
The story “InQuira Promotes Nav Chakravarti to Chief Technology Officer” tells us that InQuira is making changes within its organization. InQuira is a leading company of enterprise knowledge applications for multi-channeled customer support, social CRM, and sales enablement. Nav Chakravarti was the former vice president of solutions and his promotion to chief technology officer ushers in a new period of technology development for customers and sales.
With Chakravarti as the new CTO, InQuira hopes to helm the way for future innovations in multi-channel user support and as a Knowledge Management (KM) provider. Chakravarti has this to say about his new role,
I’ve had the privilege of engaging with our customers and partners to create, architect and deliver new applications that maximize business value based on our unique product capabilities. This perspective and experience will allow me to guide our product strategy so that we maintain our leadership position. I’m very excited about our future and am looking forward to increasing the depth and breadth of our solutions and product portfolio, and to ultimately broadening InQuira’s strategic market footprint.
InQuira is preparing for some hefty changes and hopefully an even brighter future for their company. There has been a flurry of changes in search and content processing companies in the last three months. Will the new captains of these software ships navigate the choppy waters of today’s business successfully? We hope so.
Whitney Grace, April 16, 2011
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The Semantic Web as it Stands
April 16, 2011
Semantic search for the enterprise is here, but the semantic web remains the elusive holy grail. “Semantic Web: Tools you can use” gives an overview of the existing state of semantic technology and what is needed to get it off the ground as a true semantic web technology.
Tim Berners-Lee was the first one to articulate what the semantic web would be like, and his vision of federated search is still sorely missing from reality. Federated search searches several disparate resources simultaneously (like when you search several different library databases at once). Windows 7 supports federated search, but it is still not common throughout the web. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has developed standards to support semantic web infrastructure, including SPARQL, RDF, and OWL, and Google, Yahoo and Bing are starting to use semantic metadata and support W3C standards like RDF.
Semantic software is able to analyze and describe the meaning of data objects and their inter-relationships, while resolving language ambiguities such as homonyms or synonyms, as long as standards are followed. This has practical applications with things like shopping comparisons. If standards are followed and semantic metadata provided by the merchants themselves, online shoppers can compare products without all the inaccuracies and out-of-date information currently plaguing third-party shopping comparison sites.
There are some tools, platforms, prewritten components, and services currently available to make semantic deployment easier and somewhat less expensive. Jena is an open-source Java framework for building semantic Web applications, and Sesame, is an open-source framework for storing, inferencing and querying RDF data. Lexalytics produces a semantic platform that contains general ontologies that can then be fine-tuned by service provider partners for specific business domains and applications. Revelytix sells a knowledge-modeling tool called Knoodl.com, a wiki-based framework that helps a wide variety of types of users to collaboratively develop a semantic vocabulary for domain-specific information residing on different web sites. Sinequa’s semantic platform, Context Engine, provides semantic infrastructure that includes a generic semantic dictionary that can translate between various languages and can also be customized with business-specific terms. Thomson Reuters provides Machine Readable News which collects and analyzes analyzes and scores online news for sentiment (public opinion), relevance, and novelty and OpenCalais, which creates open metadata for submitted content.
Despite all these advances for the use of the semantic web in the enterprise, general, widespread use of the semantic web remains elusive, and no one can predict exactly when that will change:
“In a 2010 Pew Research survey of about 895 semantic technology experts and stakeholders, 47% of the respondents agreed that Berners-Lee’s vision of a semantic Web won’t be realized or make a significant difference to end users by the year 2020. On the other hand, 41% of those polled predicted that it would. The remainder did not answer that query.”
Semantic technology for the enterprise is not only here today, but is growing by about 20% a year according to IDC. That kind of semantic technology is a much smaller beast to tame. When it comes to the World Wide Wide, there is still not widespread support of W3C standards and common vocabularies, which is why more people said no than yes in the survey mentioned above. Generalized web searches are difficult because each site has its own largely proprietary ontology instead of a shared and open taxonomy.
Sometimes even within an enterprise it is difficult to overcome differences in different sectors of the same business.
However, certain industries are starting to come under pressure from customers or industry and have responded by creating standardized ontologies. GoodRelations is one such e-commerce ontology used by eBestBuy.com, Overstock.com, and Google. This kind of technique has not become widespread because of the costs and slow payoff involved. This is a catch-22 where businesses don’t want to jump on the bandwagon because there is not a critical mass yet, but the real benefits won’t start until there is a large number of businesses participating. Things like product categories are often unique to a business and getting some kind of universal standardization is akin to a nightmare, but there still needs to be consensus on using some type of W3C standards of categorization to satisfy customers. And, with more an more bogus information proliferating on the web, semantics become not only convenient, but essential for finding the right information.
I think the fundamental question that this article leaves us with is whether or not we have the standards we need or whether the current standards are the stepping off point to something new. SGML was fine in its day, but it didn’t get very far. HTML cherrypicked some of the basic ideas of SGML and added linking and the World Wide Web was born. Now HTML 5 is re-introducing some of the ideas of SGML that were lost. Maybe HTML can continue to evolve, or maybe someone will cherrypick its best ideas and create something (almost) entirely new. Another issue is all the work that it takes to create all the metadata, no matter what the standards. Flickr and Facebook have made user tagging into a fun activity, but for the semantic web to really function, machines need to do do most of the work. Will this all be figured out by 2020? Survey says no, but who knows?
Alice Wasielewski
April 16, 2011
InQuira 2010 Growth
March 21, 2011
Marketwire brings to our attention that “InQuira Shows Exceptional 2010 Growth, Shatters All Prior Sales Records.” InQuira is one of the long time players in natural language processing. The company made the decision to focus on customer support and self-help applications years ago. Today the company offers knowledge applications for multi-channel customer service, sales enablement, and social CRM. For 2010, the company says that its has shown exceptional customer and revenue growth. Its partnerships include SAP and Oracle. According the write up:
“Investments in established technologies like CRM and new social channels add transactional capabilities, but create new challenges for organizations to drive a consistent knowledge experience across multiple customer touch points. Our growth is being fueled by leading brands that realize the critical need to consistently knowledge-enable their service and sales processes to deliver a world-class customer experience. Only InQuira uniquely ensures that these technologies result in worthwhile investments and deliver the business value intended.”
Taking the critical approach, has InQuira, a privately held company, really shattered “all” prior sales records? The financial data isn’t disclosed, so where is the proof? The story is still interesting. Maybe Natural Language Processing is gaining momentum but we would like some hard financial data, not assurances.
Whitney Grace, March 21, 2011
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