Author Archives: Jose C. Gonzalez

About Jose C. Gonzalez

CEO at MeaningCloud. PhD in Telecommunication Engineering. Professor at Technical University of Madrid (1985-2015).

The Analysis of Customer Experience, Touchstone in the Evolution of the Market of Language Technologies

The LT-Innovate 2014 Conference has just been held in Brussels. LT-Innovate is a forum and association of European companies in the sector of language technologies. To get an idea of the meaning and the importance of this market, suffice it to say that in Europe some 450 companies (mainly innovative SMEs) are part of it, and are responsible for 0.12% of European GDP. Daedalus is one of the fifteen European companies (and the only one from Spain) formally members of LT-Innovate Ltd. since its formation as an association, with headquarters in the United Kingdom, in 2012.

LTI_Manifesto_2014

LT-Innovate Innovation Manifesto 2014

In this 2014 edition, the document “LT-Innovate Innovation Manifesto:” Unleashing the Promise of the Language Technology Industry for a Language-Neutral Digital Single Market” has been published. I had the honor of being part of the round table which opened the conference. The main subject of my speech was the qualitative change experienced in recent times by the role of our technologies in the markets in which we operate. For years we have been incorporating our systems to solve in very limited areas the specific problems of our more or less visionary or innovative customers. This situation has already changed completely: language technologies now play a central role in a growing number of businesses.

Language Technologies in the Media Sector

In a recent post, I referred to this same issue with regard to the media sector. If before we would incorporate a solution to automate the annotation of file contents, now we deploy solutions that affect most aspects of the publishing business: we tag semantically pieces of news to improve the search experience on any channel (web, mobile, tablets), to recommend related content or additional one according to the interest profile of a specific reader, to facilitate findability and indexing by search engines (SEO, Search Engine Optimization), to place advertising related to the news context or the reader’s intention, to help monetize content in new forms, etc.

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Semantic Publishing: a Case Study for the Media Industry

Semantic Publishing at Unidad Editorial: a Client Case Study in the Media Industry 

Last year, the Spanish media group Unidad Editorial deployed a new CMS developed in-house for its integrated newsroom. Unidad Editorial is a subsidiary of the Italian RCS MediaGroup, and publishes some of the newspapers and magazines with highest circulation in Spain, besides owning nation-wide radio stations and a license of DTTV incorporating four TV channels.

Newsroom El Mundo

Newsroom El Mundo

When a journalist adds a piece of news to the system, its content has to be tagged, which constitutes one of the first steps in a workflow that will end with the delivery of this item in different formats, through different channels (print, web, tablet and mobile apps) and for different mastheads. After evaluation of different provider’s solutions in the previous months, the company then decided that semantic tagging would be done through Daedalus’ text analytics technology. Semantic publishing included, in this case, the identification (with disambiguation) of named entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), time and money expressions, concepts, classification according to the IPTC scheme (an international standard for the media industry, with around 1400 classes organized in three levels), sentiment analysis, etc.

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Textalytics sponsors the Sentiment Analysis Symposium

Next March 5-6, New York will host a new edition of the Sentiment Analysis Symposium. This is the seventh event of a series organized by industry expert Seth Grimes since year 2010 in San Francisco and NYC.

This is a unique conference in several aspects. First, it is designed specifically to serve the community of professionals interested in Human Analytics and its business application. Second, its audience is integrated by a mix of experts, strategists, practitioners, researchers, and solution providers, which makes a perfect breeding ground for discussion and exchange of points of view. Third, it is designed by just one person (not by a committee), a guarantee of consistency. Being an expert in the consultancy business, Seth Grimes achieves an excellent balance of presentations covering from technology to business application. I attended the New York 2012 edition, where I gave an enlightening talk, and I can tell that the experience was really enriching.

Sentiment Analysis Symposium 2014

Do not be misled by the title: do not interpret “Sentiment Analysis” in a narrow sense. The conference is about discovering business value in opinions, emotions, and attitudes in social media, news, and enterprise feedback. Moreover, the scope is not limited to text sources: speech and image are terms of the equation too.

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Recognizing entities in a text: not as easy as you might think!

Entities recognition: the engineering problem

As in every engineering endeavor, when you face the problem of automating the identification of entities (proper names: people, places, organizations, etc.) mentioned in a particular text, you should look for the right balance between quality (in terms of precision and recall) and cost from the perspective of your goals. You may be tempted to compile a simple list of such entities and apply simple but straightforward pattern matching techniques to identify a predefined set of entities appearing “literally” in a particular piece of news, in a tweet or in a (transcribed) phone call. If this solution is enough for your purposes (you can achieve high precision at the cost of a low recall), it is clear that quality was not among your priorities. However… What if you can add a bit of excellence to your solution without technological burden for… free? If you are interested in this proposition, skip the following detailed technological discussion and go directly to the final section by clicking here.

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