BOCA RATON, Fla.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LinguaSys, Inc., the international provider of human language technologies producing highly customized multilingual text analytics and natural language processing software, today announced the release of CCC Interpreter to improve accuracy and efficiency in the implementation of Chinese Commercial Codes (CCC). CCC’s are used to identify people and businesses without using Chinese characters in banking, compliance, foreign currency, law enforcement, immigration and trade transactions. Read more

What’s next in sentiment analytics? The road’s pointing to a deeper understanding of emotions.

“We still are clearly at the nascent level regarding text and sentiment analytics,” said David Rabjohns, CEO of social intelligence company MotiveQuest, speaking at yesterday’s Sentiment Analysis Symposium, the event organized by Seth Grimes’ Alta Plana Corp. “There are much higher levels of emotional depth still to be mined.”

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Sherpa, the number one virtual personal assistant for the Spanish speaking world, is now available in beta for the U.S. market. Starting today, Android smartphone users will be able to enjoy the platform’s many features – including searching for information, completing transactions, managing schedules and operating the device itself.

Sherpa arrives to the U.S. market with a broader knowledge base and more proactive and predictive capabilities than current market offerings and includes transactional capabilities that are unique in the virtual personal assistant category. Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/ clbean

IT leaders keeping an eye on Gartner’s top tech trends list know that early in March semantic technologies made the cut (see our original story here, and our follow-up with one of the authors of the Gartner report here). The big question for many enterprise IT pros, though, is what should they be doing with that knowledge – how can they start leveraging semantic technology to their own organizations’ benefit?

Help is on the way. Three experts in semantic web technologies and Linked Data weigh in with their advice on heading down that road:

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A new release out of Daedalus, a company we’ve recently profiled, reports, “Daedalus, a Spanish company specializing in software for information analysis, has released the first version of Sentimentalytics, a browser plug-in that automatically analyzes social media content. Sentimentalytics applies semantic and natural language processing technologies to extract meaning and tag the timelines shown in most common social media and tools. It installs on any standard browser and operates fully integrated into the web interfaces of a variety of social networks and tools (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, TweetDeck, HootSuite and others). Read more

Seen anything good on TV lately? If the answer is ‘No,’ then maybe the problem is that you and your TV just aren’t communicating as well as you could be. The same may be said of your experience across other viewing mediums, like smartphones, tablets and PCs.

Veveo wants to change the picture, so to speak. “We want the TV to be as friendly as possible so you and the TV can have a really productive relationship,” says CMO Sam Vasisht. The company, which earlier this month exhibited its Conversational Interface Technology at TV Connect 2013 in London, says there’s a need for a universal interface based on natural language capability, so that people more intuitively can grasp what is available from where in a world of fragmented content sources, including how to better search for that content and manage their viewing experiences with greater speed and ease.

“Voice is probably the most natural way for us to deliver this experience,” says Vasisht. Veveo wants to be the platform that enables service providers and OEMs and video programmers to give their audiences the power of speech. Read more

Rachel Metz of Technology Review reports, “Nuance is today announcing Voice Ads, a platform that will let companies create ads that people can talk to on smartphones and tablets. Mike McSherry, vice president of advertising and content at Nuance, says these could range from car ads that let you ask questions about the vehicle shown to ads for a sports network that allow you to get information about who won last night’s game or what time tonight’s game starts. The company has lined up partnerships with several ad agencies including Digitas, OMD, and Leo Burnett, as well as with mobile ad distribution networks JumpTap, Millennial Media, and Ad Marvel.” Read more

Search is a fundamental, a system building block, and something that should be a critical part of enterprise architectures. That’s what Grant Ingersoll, co-founder and CTO at search, discovery and analytics vendor LucidWorks – which leverages the Apache Lucene/Solr open source search project – told an audience at last week’s GigaOM Structure Data event.

The company late last year launched LucidWorks Big Data for developing Big Data applications, which builds on top of its heritage developing the LucidWorks Search solution. “It’s a platform for organizations and developers to build out next-generation data applications,” Ingersoll said in a conversation with the Semantic Web Blog. Its focus is on tight integration of key Apache open source projects and layering with a REST API, to provide developers single-source access to the stack’s richness for creating applications that provide comprehensive search, discovery and analysis of an organization’s vast content and user interactions.

LucidWorks Big Data is made up of Apache Hadoop; the Apache Mahout machine-learning library; Hive, a data warehouse system for Hadoop that facilitates data summarization, ad-hoc queries, and the analysis of large datasets stored in Hadoop-compatible file systems; and Apache OpenNLP, a machine-learning based toolkit for the processing of natural language text that supports common NLP tasks.

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ArnoldIT reports, “At Cebit in Hannover, Germany, I caught up with Antonio S. Valderrábanos, the founder of Bitext. His company has been growing rapidly, announcing deals with Salesforce and the Spanish government. Bitext provides multilingual semantic technologies, with probably the highest accuracy in the market, for companies that use text analytics and natural language interfaces. I interviewed him in April 2008. Bitext has added significant and important technology to its multi-lingual content processing system. In addition to support for more languages, the company is getting significant attention for its flexible sentiment analysis system.” Read more

Conversational user interfaces and natural language processing could be put to much more use than they currently are.  At the GigaOM Structure Data event in New York City this week, IBM distinguished engineer Currie Boyle, who leads the vendor’s North American natural language services practice, including for deep question and answer Watson-type natural language and unstructured information processing systems, and Nuance Communications CTO Vlad Sejnoha, discussed the realized promises, but also the waiting opportunities.

At Nuance, Sejnoha noted, the focus is on the notion that we are entering a time when how we interact with systems and access information and content is undergoing a “dramatic transformation.” Contributors to that include high- level artificial intelligence reasoning and natural language understanding. “We are overwhelmed with lots of data including unstructured data and these technologies make a difference in how we take advantage of all that,” he said.

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