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

Read 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”.

The report notes:

Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) said they think the original Internet

architecture will still be in place in 2020 even as it is continually

being refined. They did not believe the current Internet will be

replaced by a completely new “next-generation” system between

now and 2020. Those who wrote extended elaborations to their

answers projected the expectation that IPv6 and the Semantic Web

will be vital elements in the continuing development of the Internet

over the next decade.

 See the full Pew report here.

It seems to me that Semantic companies have to do one of two things to create value in an application:

1) Innovate a completely new application.  This puts Semantic companies in competition with every single Web/Software company and entrepreneur out there, not just the other Semantic companies.  Plus, companies have to compete against the noise of tens of thousands of Web apps already out there.

2) Improve upon existing apps that do not use Semantics (and show such an improvement that users can immediately see a difference).  I would argue that here Twine is going to face an uphill battle (and I like Twine!).  They’re a social network/”interest” application that is directly competing against many large social networks and Web discovery companies (eg Digg).  But to be successful, they must compete for, and win over, a technology agnostic audience.  This audience couldn’t care less about Semantics for Semantics’ sake, and Twine ends up competing against Facebook’s feature set and already huge network effect.

Both of these approaches are challenging.

What Semantic applications would you like to see?

Watch it here:

Here’s a sample:

I’ve been playing with the Cognition search engine for a while now and also sent the link on to some colleagues of which my friend Dan who is a proper algorithm geek, like I am.  Dr Kathleen Dahlgren from Cognition answered some questions for us, here they are:

- How does cognition feel about personalised search?

Personalized search can be augmented when the search engine understands language and can automatically see relationships that are opaque to pattern-matchers.  For example, if a person is interested in rhythm and blues, they are also interested in R&B, and probably blues as well.  But not blues meaning a bad mood.  These subtleties are all handled by Cognition.

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.