Linguamatics, Brandwatch and University of Sussex gain UKTI funding for EVOKES

PRESS RELEASE

CAMBRIDGE, England & BOSTON, Mass., Feb 06, 2012

Source: Linguamatics

Linguamatics, Brandwatch and the University of Sussex are pleased to announce a joint project funded by the UK’s Technology Strategy Board to address challenges faced by automated language processing software in harnessing diverse data sources. The project forms part of a broader Technology Strategy Board initiative focusing on enabling technologies to harness “big data” for economic growth.

The development will improve automatic extraction of information from scientific papers, news or social media for applications in research and development, marketing, and competitive intelligence.

Dr David Milward, Linguamatics CTO, points out: “Good quality vocabularies are a key part of ‘intelligent’ text mining. This project will allow us to develop vocabularies much faster, and adapt them efficiently for new applications.”
The current generation of language processing has had considerable success in extracting useful information from unstructured text, whether this is research literature or social media. However, adapting to a new domain is often a laborious process, with respect both to the type of data (e.g. newswire vs. patent literature) and to the terminology used in a given domain (e.g. in medical practice vs. pharmaceutical research). Humans can perform these tasks on small data sets, but face a huge challenge in the face of massively increasing amounts of electronic text.

The EVOKES project, which stands for “Exploitation of Diverse Data via Automatic Adaptation of Knowledge Extraction Software” will exploit distributional similarity techniques developed by the University of Sussex. The project will run for 18 months.

About Linguamatics
Linguamatics is the leader in deploying natural language processing (NLP) based text mining for complex, high-value problem solving. Used by nine of the world’s Top-10 pharmaceutical companies, and other prestigious commercial, academic and government organizations, Linguamatics operates globally, with offices in the UK and USA. Further information: www.linguamatics.com .

About Brandwatch
Social networks and the rest of the Web have become massive indicators of consumer influence, market insight and brand reputation. Launched in 2007, Brandwatch provides one of the world’s leading tools for monitoring, capturing and analyzing social media. Further information: www.brandwatch.com .

About University of Sussex
The University was first in the new wave of UK universities founded in the 1960s and is now a leading teaching and research institution. Sussex research has been formally recognized as world leading, confirming the University among the leading research universities in the UK. Further information: www.sussex.ac.uk .

About the Technology Strategy Board
The Technology Strategy Board is a business-led government body which works to create economic growth by ensuring that the UK is a global leader in innovation. Sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Technology Strategy Board brings together business, research and the public sector supporting and accelerating the development of innovative products and services to meet market needs, tackle major societal challenges and help build the future economy. For more information: www.innovateuk.org .

SOURCE: Linguamatics