Cog Blog

Stephen Lief brings technology and law practice management expertise to the company and elevates business development strategy

LOS ANGELES – April 1, 2010 – Cognition Technologies, the next-generation Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) company, announces that Stephen J. Lief has joined the company as their legal e-discovery business development expert. His role is to expand the company’s growth by developing partnerships with e-discovery vendors, law firms and enterprise legal departments.

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Despite this success, keyword search has many limits caused by its inability to process the meaning of queries and Web pages. Because of potential confusion over the meaning of words, traditional searches generally return large numbers of pages, including many irrelevant to a query. Furthermore, keyword-based approaches let search-optimization techniques artificially make hackers’ or other irrelevant pages rise to the top of search results.

Semantic search would solve many of these problems, said Kathleen Dahlgren, chief technology officer of Cognition Technologies, a vendor of semantic-based text-processing technology. Semantic-search tools use document tags and topic-based indexes of material to create a model that represents what various pieces of content mean. This lets a search engine more precisely respond to a query by disambiguating the multiple meanings of words in a document and determining how they relate to one another within a sentence. Semantic search could be the Semantic Web’s killer app, said Peter Mika, a researcher and data architect at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona.

Read the full article at Computing Now.

Cognition’s Proprietary Semantic Technologies to be leveraged by Microsoft’s DecisionEngine Bing™ and Other Applications

LOS ANGELES – February 16, 2010 — Cognition Technologies, the creator of the most advanced and complete semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology on the market, today announced that Microsoft Corp. has licensed some of its proprietary semantic technologies and will be using them to enhance Bing and other applications within Microsoft. Specifically, Microsoft will incorporate Cognition’s comprehensive and robust Semantic Map of the English language.

The non-exclusive licensing arrangement enables Microsoft to embed elements of Cognition’s semantic technologies into any Microsoft application which would benefit from an “understanding” of the English language. Initially, it will be used to enhance the user experience in Bing, Microsoft’s online decision engine.

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Cognition’s New Advanced Syntactic Parser, Combined with the World’s Largest Semantic Map of English, Enables Tag-Free Semantic Search

LOS ANGELES – November 5, 2009 — Cognition  Technologies, the next-generation Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) company, announces a significant advancement in its Semantic Search capabilities through the release of its advanced syntactic parser module.  Cognition’s powerful Search technology is currently available as an embedded component within applications to make them “semantically aware.”  Examples of this include LexisNexis Concordance and Merrill Lextranet within the legal e-discovery and litigation support markets, where it is being used to cut document review time and costs by 30-50 percent and significantly improve search precision and recall across large data sets. Other applications enhanced by Cognition’s advanced Semantic NLP include interpretation of voice interaction, user question interpretation, mobile Search, customer sentiment analysis, medical informatics and publishing.
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Cognition Technologies has recently added an advanced syntactic parser module to its language-understanding technology. “What does that mean?”, you ask? It means that Cognition can now “parse”, or break down, the component parts of sentences to deliver an even more accurate and complete understanding of the content. Since words often have more than one meaning, the ability to parse sentences enhances the technology’s ability to understand the context and sentence structure of the material being analyzed.

Cognition’s Advanced Syntactic Parser enhances Cognition’s Search technology by making fuller use of the meaning relationships between the words in a sentence (e.g. context), which is a key piece in the language-understanding puzzle. The parser improves upon the already high accuracy of our pre-parser system by significantly reducing error rates in word meaning disambiguation (i.e. understanding the correct meaning of a word based upon the context in which it is used).

“Cognition’s parser is also a significant stepping-stone to future capabilities which will take the technology well beyond just Search functionality,” said Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren, Cognition’s founder and CTO. “Examples include enhanced reasoning within and across sentences, anaphora resolution (i.e., identifying the referents of “he” or “them”, etc. within a document), and the development of a true question-answering system in the future. The parser is a critical component needed to bring a fuller sense of understanding to the content housed on the Web.”

Here are some examples of Search accuracy improvements due to the introduction of the new advanced parser are:

Query: “What happened after Rome fell to the Visigoths?”

The pre-parser system incorrectly interprets “fell” as the stem “fell” as in “to fell a tree.” The advanced parser recognizes that “fell”, followed by a prepositional phrase, is a better match for the “concede or defeat” sense of the stem “fall” and correctly picks that stem.

Query: When did the U.S. begin building monuments?”

The pre-parser system incorrectly analyzes “building” as the noun meaning “edifice or structure”. The advanced parser system recognizes that “building” must be a verb in the sentence and correctly picks the “construct” meaning of the stem “build”.

Read more info here, or try the advanced parser for yourself at www.Cognition.com. The Cognition Website enables you to semantically search Wikipedia, a database of Supreme Court and Appellate Court cases in the Federal Court system since 1950, the Medline medical abstract database, and the four Gospels of the New Testament.

The Merrill Corporation, a leading provider of outsourced solutions for complex business communication and information management, recently launched its Merrill-Lextranet™ version 5.6 which features an integration with Cognition Technologies’ Semantic Search and discovery technology.

Cognition helps Merrill-Lextranet with early identification and review of key evidence, and enables their e-discovery clients (i.e. law firms) to conduct more meaningful content searches and uncover relevant evidence more quickly and at a lower cost.

Cognition improves Merrill-Lextranet’s review process by:

• Reducing the number of documents needing manual review (i.e. culling out irrelevant and unrelated information);
• Finding all documents about a given case issue, regardless of how the issue is worded (i.e. Cognition enables the user to search on concepts, not just key words);
• Finding all documents in a richer set of documents with fewer unrelated or irrelevant documents, thereby saving significant Reviewer time and money;
• Forming conceptual Booleans that organize the documents into case-issue related folders which are more conducive to review because all documents in the folder are about the same issue, and because there are fewer documents to review;

For more information on Cognition Legal, please click here.

SearchEngineJournal.com wrote an article entitled “9 Semantic Search Engines That Will Change the World of Search” and included Cognition Technologies in the group.

Read the full article here.

In advance of the Boston Search Engine Meeting, Dr. Dahlgren, Cognition Technologies’ CTO and founder, was interviewed by Harry Collier of Infonortics and the interview was posted on Stephen Arnold’s ArnoldIT.com site.

It is a great interview and a cutting-edge look at the future of search as seen through the eyes of our very own Dr. Dahlgren.  In the article she discusses what she views as the three major challenges in the search field, as well as many other important facts about Semantic NLP and the Semantic Web.

Check out the full article here.

Great article about Merrill Lextranet, a Cognition Technologies’ customer:

After evaluating and using Merrill Lextranet’s 5.6 version of its case management solution, we would definitely place it in that category and consider it to be among the best-in-class solutions currently available.

Cognition Technologies is part of Merrill Lextranet’s solution:

Lextranet has augmented its native search capabilities with conceptual search, in this case by incorporating third-party software from Cognition. Conceptual search looks for documents not by matching keywords, but rather by identifying documents containing words related to a concept. For example, a conceptual search for the word “airplane” might return documents that do not contain the word “airplane,” but do contain the word “glider” or “helicopter.”

Read the full article: “EDD Case Management with Lextranet”.

In December I spoke on a panel at SES Chicago about how Semantic Search will change our lives. I wanted to do a blog post about what some of the speakers said.

Semantic Search means various things. To several of the speakers on this panel it means search based on recovery of the detailed linguistic meaning of the query and target document base. To others it means recovery of “sentiment” or evaluative language in customer reviews of vendors such as restaurants. To others it means search in semantically tagged fields or structured data in a relational database.

Several of the speakers in the panel agreed that a radical shift in search in which meaning-based indices are searched, rather than pattern-based indices, is going to make the next big improvement in search. Similarly, ads will be placed based on meaning. As Tim Musgrove of TextDigger said, it’s silly for various vendors with different types of businesses all to fight over the keyword “palm”. The word (or pattern) is relevant to palm trees, palm pilots, or palms of the hand (say for a sporting-goods vendor). If linguistic semantic search replaced string search, there would be three different keywords (for different meanings of “palm”).

The Powerset speaker (Scott Prevost) agreed. He explained that Powerset linguistic processing enables their search engine to distinguish “who did what to whom”. This avoids false hits due to argument structure, so a query about “Who did Merrill-Lynch acquire” does not retrieve a document about Bank of American acquiring Merrill-Lynch. Also, Powerset’s linguistic semantics enables their search engine to find facts about query entities in free text, and use those facts to enhance search result displays.

Larry Cornett of Yahoo! described the use of structured data along with free text to improve the effectiveness of retrieval results. Developers are allowed to add structured data and create applications that modify and augment the display on the Yahoo! results page. For example, a restaurant review developer could show ratings, reviews, address, and other information most users want about a restaurant, directly on the results page. This type of semantics dovetails with Web 3.0 tagging in that structured semantic information is introduced by hand through knowledge engineering.

Nadaraju Bandaru of Boorah! explained “sentiment extraction”, where reviews of offerings such as restaurants are rated on sentiment scales to decide whether they are “boo” or “rah” ratings. These results are displayed to help users quickly decide upon their choice. Sentiment scales are determined by the semantics of words in the reviews such as “yummy”, “delicious”, “nice”, etc. Boorah! also illustrates the advantage of focusing on a vertical to narrow the range of meanings, improving precision.

This panel suggests that there is significant interest in improving the search experience with semantics, especially deep linguistic semantics a la Cognition and Powerset.