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.  Go to Cognition.com/GilbaneGroup.

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

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.

Prior to joining the company, Mr. Lief served as Of Counsel for the law firm of Labaton Sucharow, LLP, where he guided the firm’s discovery management efforts for a number of complex and high profile domestic and international litigation matters. Prior to that, Mr. Lief served as the Director of Litigation Support at several New York-based litigation law firms, where he advised fellow attorneys on the latest in practical technology applications, including automated litigation support, document assembly and imaging, electronic trial presentation, and voice recognition systems.

“We are excited to have Stephen join our company,” said Bill Collins, Chairman of Cognition Technologies. “His past experience and expertise in the industry is a great fit for our company as we continue to leverage our successes within the legal e-discovery market.”

Mr. Lief is a regular speaker for CLE sessions at national, state and local bar associations. He has served as the founding editor of numerous publications, including Information Technology Law & Practice Newsletter, Law Products Magazine, AmLawTech Magazine, Law Technology Product News Magazine, and Legal Tech Newsletter.

Mr. Lief is based in New York City.

About Cognition:

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

Carolyn Depko | Edge Legal Marketing | 732-533-0137 | cdepko@edgelegalmarketing.com

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.

“Cognition’s comprehensive Semantic Map will help us continue to improve the search experiences we can offer to consumers,” said Ron Kaplan, chief scientist in the Powerset division of Bing at Microsoft. “After several months of evaluation working closely with the technical team at Cognition, we believe that Cognition’s semantic technologies can help us provide better results for Bing customers.”

Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren, Cognition’s founder and CTO, added, “Cognition’s Semantic Map will contribute conceptual reasoning and precise question-answering that will mesh well with Microsoft’s existing search 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.

“We are obviously very pleased that Microsoft has recognized the significant value of Cognition’s semantic technologies,” said Scott Jarus, Cognition’s CEO. “Microsoft joins a list of 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.”

More information about Cognition’s Semantic NLPTM technology is available on its Website at www.cognition.com.

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).

Cognition: Giving Technologies New Meaning.™

Media Contact:
Scott Jarus | Cognition Technologies | 310-641-7200 x210 | Scott.Jarus@cognition.com

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.

Cognition’s advanced syntactic parser greatly enhances Cognition’s Search technology by making fuller use of meaning relationships between words (syntactic context), particularly between the verbs and arguments in a sentence which is a key piece in the language-understanding puzzle.  The parser improves upon the already high accuracy of the 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).  This is accomplished with no decrease in query speed and only a moderate increase in indexing time.

Cognition’s syntactic parser is a CYK (Cocke-Younger-Kasami algorithm, a bottom-up parsing method) deductive chart parser for MCFGs (Multiple Context-Free Grammars, a mildly context sensitive grammar formalism) which leverages Cognition’s extensive Semantic Map of the English language.  It is successful, in part, due to the robust and comprehensive representation of syntactic and semantic features in Cognition’s Semantic Map, which is the world’s largest map, containing more than 506,000 word stem (word root) and 536,000 word sense (word meaning) entries.

“Beyond accuracy improvement, Cognition’s advanced syntactic parser is an essential step towards realization of the Semantic Web which evolves content from simple data to real information,” said Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren, Cognition’s founder and CTO. “A parser is needed to facilitate content understanding because, in the process of understanding, we need to recognize the relationships between things (e.g. who did what to whom?), the references of pronouns (e.g. who was “he” in a text?), relationships of events (e.g. time sequence, causal sequence), and numerical values (e.g. one vs. many).”

Examples of Search accuracy improvements due to the introduction of the new advanced parser are:

Query: “Which car companies tanked?”

The pre-parser system incorrectly interprets “tanked” as “to gas up” while the advanced parser recognizes the correct meaning as “to fail or decline” because, in this case, it is an intransitive verb usage and Cognition’s sub-categorizations (syntactic feature data) prefer this meaning for this sentence.

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.”

More information about this capability and Cognition’s Semantic NLP™ technology is available on its Web site at www.cognition.com, along with the ability to perform queries on several well-known data sets, such as Wikipedia™.

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).

Cognition: Giving technologies new meaning.™

Media Contact

Scott Jarus | Cognition Technologies | 310-641-7200 x210 | Scott.Jarus@cognition.com

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.

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”.

Watch it here:

Here’s a snippet:

Depending on what word you type into an Internet search engine, you can get a range of results. One man’s rat could be a rodent and another man’s rat could be a traitor.

Now, Cognition Technologies Inc., a Culver City firm, thinks it has a solution. This month, it introduced what it calls the largest semantic map of the English language for computers.

Click here to read their coverage.

Another semantic search technology vendor also entered the health space: Cognition Technologies, Inc. introduced Semantic MEDLINE, a free service that lets users employ a natural, conversational sentence structure to search the MEDLINE database. It uses Cognition’s Semantic Map technology to “understand” the meaning behind words, phrases, and idioms.

The most interesting part of the article to me were the survey stats by Trampoline Systems:

Trampoline Systems, a provider of enterprise social intelligence tools, studied enterprise social networking, surveying 111 businesses in the U.S. and the U.K. The company’s research revealed that 88% of businesses are eager to start using social networking, although many are looking for more business functionality than in consumer social networks. Some key findings include the following:

* Eighty-four percent of businesses reported that social networking would help with sharing knowledge and expertise with colleagues across the organization and 68% would like help with finding relevant specific information.

* Sixty-nine percent want to interact with colleagues they don’t know.

Cognition’s Semantic Map can play a key role in social networks and collaboration.  I’ll write more on that soon.

Read the entire RedOrbit article here.