Cog Blog

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

  Cognition to Power Grabbit’s Online Recommendation Engine

Grabbit Helps Recommend Products, Content, and People Using Cognition’s

Semantic Natural Language Processing in a Ground-Breaking “Web 3.0” Semantic Web Application

 SAN MATEO, CALIFORNIA – September 1, 2010 – Grabbit, the developer of a new suite of cloud-hosted web services for social media and other content providers is pleased to announce a strategic partnership with Cognition Technologies, a Los Angeles based company that is a leader in semantic analysis and language processing. The exclusive partnership will focus on combining Cognition’s revolutionary Semantic Natural Language Processing technology with Grabbit’s patent-pending system for making online recommendations of products, content, and people.

 By using Cognition’s state-of-the-art semantic technology to analyze Tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts, friends, locations, product purchases, brand preferences, and other data, Grabbit will be able to intelligently recommend products, content, and people that a Grabbit user might find interesting.

 “Grabbit has developed a ground-breaking, patent-pending system for helping social media and other content providers improve the quality of their services and open up new revenue streams,” says Peter Karnig, Grabbit’s CEO. “Grabbit’s system is one of the first large-scale “Web 3.0” or semantic web products to be developed for the consumer market.”

 Cognition provides a powerful set of semantic tools to power Grabbit’s new web services. The scope of Cognition’s Semantic Map is more than double the size of any other computational linguistic dictionary for English, and includes more than ten million semantic connections that are comprised of semantic contexts, meaning representations, taxonomy and word meaning distinctions. The Map encompasses over 540,000 word senses (word and phrase meanings); 75,000 concept classes (or synonym classes of word meanings); 8,000 nodes in the technology’s ontology or classification scheme; and 510,000 word stems (roots of words) for the English language. Cognition’s lexical resources encode a wealth of semantic, morphological and syntactic information about the words contained within documents and their relationships to each other. These resources were created, codified and reviewed by lexicographers and linguists over a span of more than 25 years.

 “We are excited that Grabbit has recognized the significant value of Cognition’s semantic technologies, and created a major new application for them” said Bill Collins, Cognition’s CEO. “Grabbit joins Microsoft and a list of other companies in the legal litigation support, publishing and life sciences industries who have also recognized Cognition’s ability to bring meaning and understanding to vast amounts of information.”

 About Grabbit, Inc.

The patent-pending Grabbit™ platform enables social media and other content publishers to easily leverage semantic technology to improve the user experience of their sites, while also providing a significant new revenue opportunity. Grabbit’s modular, cloud-hosted platform has created a new standard for online information distribution and consumption, and offers a new type of relationship with people, content, and the products, services, and brands they want, leveraging the power of “word of mouth” and semantic matching. Grabbit runs on mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android), the web, and TV (via Wii, Xbox, and PS3 gaming consoles) allowing users people to view, send/receive, publish/subscribe, and manage ongoing real-time updates and alerts across a wide range of social networks, information, media, and commerce.

 About Cognition:

Cognition Technologies, based in Los Angeles, has developed a revolutionary Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology which adds word and phrase meaning and “understanding” to computer applications, enabling them to be more human-like in their processing of information. Cognition’s Semantic Map, the underlying technology developed over the past 24 years, is the largest and most extensive in existence. Applications and technologies which utilize Cognition’s Semantic NLP™ technology are positioned to take full advantage of Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web).

 For further information contact: Lisa Padilla, CMO of Grabbit at lisa@grabbit.net or (415) 637-9456

Semantic technology experts, the Gilbane Group, names Cognition Technologies a leader in landmark report on the Semantic marketplace and applications for the enterprise.

LOS ANGELES – September 1, 2010 – Cognition Technologies, the next-generation Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) company, today announced that it has been highlighted in the Gilbane Group’s latest research entitled Semantic Software Technologies:  Landscape of High Value Applications for the Enterprise.  This new landmark report is a must for any company interested in learning how semantic technologies and applications can help them achieve their corporate goals.  The report, along with a special profile by the Gilbane Group about Cognition Technologies, can be downloaded free of charge at Cognition.com/GilbaneGroup.

“Cognition is a company that has been building its Semantic Map of the English language for over a decade.”  As noted by Lynda Moulton, Senior Analyst and Consultant with the Gilbane Group a division of Outsell, Inc., the semantic technology marketplace is in a formative stage with numerous companies offering natural language processing (NLP) software options. “Cognition is notable for its advanced linguistic text processing tools currently being leveraged by their partners in commercial semantic applications. Cognition’s NLP expertise and its collaborative approach to building ontologies is well-respected by both developers of semantic platforms and academic researchers. They also understand the potential for Cognition tools to jump-start their adoption of NLP, putting them to use in their own applications.”

A fully capable search engine technology, Cognition currently partners with well-known technology companies, including Microsoft’s Bing search engine, to make other applications smarter.  Cognition calls this their ability to “semantically enable” other technology applications.  Giving technologies a near-complete understanding of the English language is a major competitive advantage for any enterprise search, e-discovery, or other technology which relies on text to operate.  “Cognition’s partners greatly appreciate the fact that they can integrate a superior Semantic technology like Cognition’s that does not rely on Semantic mark-up language or page tagging,” stated Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren, the company’s founder and CTO, “Based on the continued explosion of information and related categories, it is becoming clear that manual tagging will soon no longer be practical.  Likewise, statistical approaches to tagging are highly error prone and not reliable enough for commercial use.  Through our Semantic Map of the English language, we can provide true auto-categorization at a high level of precision and recall.  This allows the growing mountain of data to be controlled and put to valuable use.”

The backbone of Cognition’s technology is its development of the world’s largest Semantic Map of the English language, combined with proprietary algorithms related to disambiguation, parsing, sense restrictions and related capabilities .  The scope of Cognition’s Semantic Map is more than double the size of any other computational linguistic dictionary for English, and includes more than ten million semantic connections that are comprised of semantic contexts, meaning representations, taxonomy and word meaning distinctions. The Map encompasses over 540,000 word senses (word and phrase meanings); 75,000 concept classes (or synonym classes of word meanings); 8,000 nodes in the technology’s ontology or classification scheme; and 510,000 word stems (roots of words) for the English language. Cognition’s lexical resources encode a wealth of semantic, morphological and syntactic information about the words contained within documents and their relationships to each other. These resources were created, codified and reviewed by lexicographers and linguists over a span of more than 25 years.

In addition to the Gilbane Group’s landmark overview of the Natural Language Processing marketplace, their “deep-dive” into Cognition Technologies is a helpful tool to evaluate Cognition’s advanced semantic technology and application tools for developers.  The report states:

“Cognition‟s toolset, in both scope and depth, contribute to its emerging leadership position in the semantic software market as a partner for building both enterprise solution applications and better semantic Web searching. Cognition’s semantic map alone, painstakingly crafted with advanced grammatical rules, contains over ½ million base word forms and provides a much needed jumping off point for developers. Using it to build value-added software applications, suppliers to the marketplace will deliver more precision in search results with better recall using natural language processing.

“Cognition NLP is a building block for Web 3.0.”

Read more about the semantic software industry and a full review of Cognition by downloading the Gilbane report, Semantic Software Technologies; Landscape of High Value Applications for the Enterprise and the accompanying deep-dive about Cognition by filling out this form.

About Cognition Technologies:

Cognition Technologies (www.cognition.com), based in Los Angeles, has developed a revolutionary Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology which adds word and phrase meaning and “understanding” to computer applications, enabling them to be more human-like in their processing of information. Cognition’s Semantic Map, the underlying technology developed over the past 25 years, is the largest and most extensive in existence. Applications and technologies that utilize Cognition’s Semantic NLP™ technology are positioned to take full advantage of Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web).

Media Contact

Bill Collins | Cognition Technologies | 310-594-7566 | bill.collins@cognition.com

Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren | Cognition Technologies | 310-641-7200 x 220| kathleen.dahlgren@cognition.com

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”.