Mare Lucas of Wired.com reports, “Many postulate that the explosion in Big Data will usher in an insatiable demand for data scientists able to slice and dice data to guide more informed decision making within the organization. Others go a step further, bemoaning that a chronic data scientist shortage will hold back the full potential of Big Data. Concern is unsurprising. For years, the BI and data analytics conversation was framed around how to aggregate massive volumes of data and then unleash the data scientists to find the value. Today, despite the information deluge, enterprise decision makers are often unable to access the data in a useful way. The tools are designed for those who speak the language of algorithms and statistical analysis. It’s simply too hard for the everyday user to ‘ask’ the data any questions – from the routine to the insightful. The end result? The speed of big data moves at a slower pace … and the power is locked in the hands of the few.” Read more

Centurion, South Africa (PRWEB) April 26, 2013 — Gatfol serves base technology to provide digital devices with the ability to process human natural language efficiently.

The goal of truly semantic search has not yet fully been realized. The main problem is the enormity of ambiguous word permutations of semantic equivalence in even the simplest of phrases, which up to now has processing-wise required huge structured lexicons and ontologies as guides. Read more

Sean O’Neill of Tnooz reports, “ZapTravel‘s elevator pitch is that it’s ‘a smart Kayak for tailored deals when you don’t know where or when you want to go.’ Type in a query in natural language, like ‘go hiking in Italy in May,’ and the site will provide information on relevant flights, hotels and activities. While Google sometimes is able to resolve ‘SFO to LAX for April 4‘, ZapTravel claims to let users ask broad queries. Examples: ‘I’d like to get away from London for a long-weekend to a place with notable cuisine’ or ‘I want to visit a notable LGBT event in Europe in May.’ Or ‘We want to take a honeymoon to a beach destination staying in a 5 star hotel for under 1,000 euros’.” Read more

Rip Empson of TechCrunch reports, “Ginger Software is on a mission to become the go-to spell-checking tool for Android. This week, the Israeli makers of natural language technology designed to help native and ESL speakers better express themselves, released its latest free mobile app for Android, called the Ginger Keyboard.  Simply put, the Keyboard is a straightforward, easy-to-use proofreading app that allows users to correct full texts with one click. While there are plenty of proofreading and grammar apps to be found in Google Play, most of them are educational apps, grammar exercises and dictionaries. However, Ginger’s new app is meant to your cross-app proofreading tool, as it integrates with any and all Android apps you have installed on your phone, whether it be SMS, email, Twitter or Facebook.” Read more

Ivan Herman recently offered some insight into how Watson actually works. Herman reports, “I was at Chris Welty’s keynote yesterday at the WWW2012 Conference. His talk was on Jeopardy/Watson and, although this is not the first time I heard/saw something on Watson, some things really became clear only at his keynote. Namely: what is really the central paradigm that made the question answering mechanism so successful in the case of Watson? Well… query answering in Watson is not some sort of a deterministic algorithm that turns a natural language question into a query into a huge set of data. This approach does not work.” Read more

Stephen Wolfram generously gave me a two-hour demo of Wolfram Alpha last evening, and I was quite positively impressed.  As he said, it’s not AI, and not aiming to be, so it shouldn’t be measured by contrasting it with HAL or Cyc but with Google or Yahoo. 

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