Ivan Kulikov of Gazea.ru recently wrote, “What is the difference between the search engine function and computer linguistics? Can natural language and machine language be merged? What counts as a language? Vladimir Selegey, head of the faculty of computer linguistics at the Russian State University for the Humanities and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and director of the ABBYY linguistics research company, answered these and other questions for Gazeta.ru.”

Selegey stated, “The linguistics technology behind modern search engines is pretty basic. Let me explain what I mean here. Search engines are currently dominated by statistical methodology: they deliver quick results but without any linguistic analysis; they compare humongous quantities of text data on the system and the history of queries that have been fed in. Read more

Devindra Hardawar of Venture Beat reports, “Like one part Siri and one part morning news update, a new app called Winston could change the way you consume news online. Launching today on the iPhone for free, Winston reads aloud recent news and social media updates through a distinguished electronic English accent. The app summarizes news to highlight the juicy bits, and it also translates your Twitter and Facebook updates into easily absorbed nuggets (ignoring hashtags, abbreviations, and the usual social media mess).” Read more

According to a new article, “Upstream Commerce, which develops pricing and assortment intelligence solutions for retailers, today announced that the company has secured $3 million in funding. The proceeds will be used to further expand the company’s pricing intelligence solutions. The investment was raised from YL Ventures, Bright Capital, and private investors. Upstream Commerce’s pricing intelligence solution is a cloud-based service using advanced artificial intelligence, semantic analysis and data-mining technology that enables retailers to compete more effectively, increase sales and grow profit margins using 24/7 comprehensive competitor pricing and assortment tracking and analytics.” Read more

According to a release out of the company, “Parta Dialogue, a leader in social media optimization, analytics and Social Learning, announces today that it has signed a letter of intent (LOI) to acquire MyTwatch, a private Paris-based e-intelligence and social marketing technology company.” Parta Dialogue CEO Paul Allard commented, “This acquisition is an important step for us in building out the most robust offering in the market for brands and companies to win at digital social media strategy. MyTwatch’s proprietary listening technology and semantic analysis round out our strengths in creating, distributing and measuring social media content. With the capability to execute in 6 languages, their platform will become a key aspect in our effort to attract customers globally.” Read more

David Worthington of the IBM Smart Planet blog recently wrote, “Everpix, a San Francisco start-up founded just over a year ago, has introduced a new service that uses semantic understanding to highlight and rediscover photos that may be of interest. If you’re like me, the number of photos that you have taken has multiplied since you began using a smartphone that stores pictures in the cloud. Everpix’s theory is that your photo collection is getting so big that it’s too unwieldy to manage. Even casual users will have more than doubled their collections, it says. Its solution is a new ‘highlights’ view that scans photos to obtain a sense of its scene or composition, and then it pairs those photos together into collections. It attempts to determine image quality, so that out of focus shots are not displayed, and the best shot is chosen to represent the collection. You can drill down to see the rest.” Read more

According to an article out of the company, “Expert System, the semantic technology company, conducted a semantic analysis to understand the reaction of Twitter users after the activation of @pontifex, and the response to the first tweets by Pope Benedict XVI on December 12. Using the Cogito semantic software, Expert System analyzed a sample of more than 20,000 tweets to the Pope’s Twitter accounts and hashtags related to #askpontifex. The tweets were classified in the predominant categories of religion; art, culture and entertainment; economy and finance; and crime. Among the most relevant topics were people (Pope, Jesus and God), places (Vatican, Africa, Rome and Italy), verbs (do, can, tell, know, must, pay) and nouns (church, gold, question, child, Christmas, truth and Sunday).” Read more

According to a new article out of the company, “Leadspace, Inc. today announced that it has joined Marketo LaunchPoint, Marketo’s ecosystem of marketing solutions. By integrating with the Marketo marketing software, Leadspace will enable B2B marketing and sales organizations to lift conversion rates, boost productivity and grow their pipeline. The Leadspace Social Lead Targeting platform uniquely analyzes the presence of individuals and companies on social networks, web sites and multiple contact databases, helping marketers and sales people to: Discover new, hyper-targeted prospects; Create highly specialized and segmented lead lists; Rank leads based on their online presence.” Read more

According to a recent article out of the company, “Market intelligence leader Cipher Systems is launching ‘Knowledge.Hub’, a knowledge management and a strategic intelligence platform based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Knowledge.Hub leverages some of SharePoint’s most innovative collaboration and content sharing capabilities, and is powered by a unique federated search feature, which provides a single point of search across internal documents, social media and web news. Knowledge.Hub is designed to help business professionals share important content and generate value-added strategic intelligence across their organization.” Read more

As they did with the first presidential debate and the second, Expert System has released their semantic analysis of the third and final presidential debate. According to the company, “In this debate, Governor Romney spoke more, using shorter sentences with a slightly simpler construction (a total of 554 clauses with an average of two prepositions per clause), versus President Obama who used approximately three prepositions per clause (for a total of 393 clauses). As in the previous two debates, the language style and words choice of both candidates can be classified as usual or common, and likely reflect the candidates’ attempts to reach a wide and diverse electorate.” Read more

Expert System has performed a semantic analysis of the language used by President Obama and Governor Romney in the second presidential debate: “Findings of the results are based on analysis of the debate transcripts and highlight the semantic differences in the candidates’ language, despite the linguistic similarities… A quantitative linguistic analysis shows a greater similarity between the two candidates: Both use more or less the same number of sentences (President Obama with 496 sentences made up of 1,398 prepositions; Governor Romney with 1,406 prepositions spread over 554 sentences), and the same lexical structure in terms of style and word choice (80% of the words used by both candidates are classified as usual or common language). In the first debate, President Obama used longer sentences and a more complex sentence construction.” Read more