NEC simplifies the voice translation problem
NEC announced research-level technology that lets a cellphone automatically translate from Japanese into English. The key idea is that they are generating text output, not speech, which lets them sidestep pesky problems about accuracy. I.e. (emphasis mine):
One second after the phone hears speech in Japanese, the cellphone with the new technology shows the text on the screen. One second later, an English version appears. …
“We would need to study how to recognise [sic] voices on the phone precisely. Another problem would be how the person on the other side of the line could know if his or her words are being translated correctly,” he said.
| Categories: Language recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), Speech recognition | Leave a Comment |
Monash Research in 2008
Text Technologies, obviously, has a parent company — Monash Research. It’s time to fill you all in on some of the exciting things we have going on.
We’ve upgraded our whole line of vendor services, adding attractive new consulting packages, starting the new Monash Research webcast series, and sharpening our white paper services as well. Most important, we enhanced our flagship Monash Advantage executive program, based on how members have actually used it in the inaugural year. Monash Advantage membership now includes significantly more consulting than before. Membership also remains the only way to get access to our Monash Letter analyst reports — such as our blockbuster guide to strategic marketing (coming soon) — and to our webcast and white paper sponsorship opportunities.
We also updated our main website at www.monash.com. It’s now even easier to keep up with all our research, or just with our most important news. We added to our already stellar lists of customers and testimonials. We redesigned the users’ guide to our white papers. And of course we updated the descriptions of our services. We even changed our name, for the first time in 17 years, although we’ll continue using “Monash Information Services” for financial dealings only.
Of course, we’re not stopping there. For example, there will be further changes when the Monash Research webcasts start being announced, held, and archived. User-oriented (as opposed to vendor-oriented) services will continue to be expanded. And we plan to redesign Text Technologies and our other blog sites, some time in early 2008.
I look forward to working with you all over the next year.
| Categories: About this blog | Leave a Comment |
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and other SEO spam explained
I average upwards of 100 spam comments per day per blog, very little of which actually gets through (although that very little is obviously enough to be quite annoying!). Recent research from Sunbelt explains part of what’s going on. (More here in Computerworld.) What’s going on is this:
1. Aggressive black-hat SEO is being done for all kind of long-tail terms and phrases, by posting comment spam filled with little except links on those phrases. For example, one of the first spams I checked for this post consists simply of 10 links to the same .cn, with anchor text, with anchor text and subdomain name being the same keyphrase. Keyphrases included “an occurrence at owl creek bridge”, “allegheny assessment county tax”, and “am been hate i ive who who.” As this kind of spam came by, I’d been wondering why people bothered, since it didn’t seem terribly easy to monetize. Read more
| Categories: Search engine optimization (SEO), Spam and antispam | 1 Comment |
I would like to know what Factiva is up to
Who should I talk with?
Technorati Tags: Factiva
| Categories: Factiva/Dow Jones | 2 Comments |
Beatblogging recognizes that communities take work
Beatblogging is a plan to let reporters build social networks out of their list of sources. On one level, that’s no different from setting up a forum to let readers post about stories. But of course there’s a big difference; the reporter is actively involved eliciting and acting upon content provided.
So I have a better, albeit immodest, analogy — Beatblogging is a whole lot like what I already do. Go to my search page and search on Olivier Jouve or Mary Crissey or Mike Stonebraker (most particularly) or Andy Astor or Bill Hobbib or Stuart Frost. You’ll find quite a bit of community participation from exactly the people who are my sources.
Could it be a lot richer than that? Sure. But these are busy people, watching what they say for marketing reasons, and in some cases competing directly with each other. It takes a fair amount of wheedling to get even as much out of them as I do. 🙂
Frankly, with all the blogs and home pages and so on people have today, I’m not sure there’s a point in building yet another destination social network. Fostering discussion on existing blogs and the like may make more sense. We’ll see.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | Leave a Comment |
Clarabridge does SaaS, sees Inxight
I just had a quick chat with text mining vendor Clarabridge’s CEO Sid Banerjee. Naturally, I asked the standard “So who are you seeing in the marketplace the most?” question. Attensity is unsurprisingly #1. What’s new, however, is that Inxight – heretofore not a text mining presence vs. commercially-focused Clarabridge – has begun to show up a bit this quarter, via the Business Objects sales force. Sid was of course dismissive of their current level of technological readiness and integration – but at least BOBJ/Inxight is showing up now.
The most interesting point was text mining SaaS (Software as a Service). When Clarabridge first put out its “We offer SaaS now!” announcement, I yawned. But Sid tells me that about half of Clarabridge’s deals now are actually SaaS. The way the SaaS technology works is pretty simple. The customer gathers together text into a staging database – typically daily or weekly – and it gets sucked into a Clarabridge-managed Clarabridge installation in some high-end SaaS data center. If there’s a desire to join the results of the text analysis with some tabular data from the client’s data warehouse, the needed columns get sent over as well. And then Clarabridge does its thing. Read more
| Categories: BI integration, Clarabridge, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, IBM and UIMA, Software as a Service (SaaS), Text mining, Text mining SaaS | 1 Comment |
Everybody’s talking about structured/unstructured integration
Today’s big news is IBM’s $5 billion acquisition of Cognos. Part of the analyst conference call was two customer examples of how the companies had worked together in the past — and one of those two had a lot of “integration of structured and unstructured data.” The application sounded more like a 360-degree customer view, retrieving text documents alongside relational records, than it did like hardcore text analytics. Even so, it illustrates a trend that I was seeing even before BOBJ’s buy of Inxight, namely an increasing focus in the business intelligence world on at least the trappings of text analytics.
| Categories: BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, IBM and UIMA | 3 Comments |
The integrated marketing communications blog
Following up on a piece earlier this year, I just published a Monash Letter called “Online Marketing Shortcuts.” As always, it’s proprietary to Monash Advantage members, but I’ll share one key idea here. That’s the integrated marcom blog, which is pretty much the single most efficient thing a marcom department can do to communicate multiple messages to multiple audiences. Here’s a brief excerpt from the Letter:
Marcom does a lot of different things. But most of it can be categorized as the dissemination of four kinds of information and opinion:
Customer success evidence – since everybody cares a lot.
Technical strategy and theory – especially for high-end evaluators and influencers.
Technical facts – for anybody who cares.
Other kinds of facts and news (e.g. events, major executive hirings, awards, etc.) — in case anybody cares.
By a combination of original articles and pointers to pre-existing resources, one blog can provide major help in all four areas.
Most important, a marcom blog gives many opportunities to enhance customer success story-telling. For example, you can:
- Call attention to stories you publish or place elsewhere (on your own sites, in the media, whatever).
- Add detail and context to the stories you publish elsewhere.
- Follow up when there are deployments or expanded usage at previously announced customers.
- Summarize customer stories presented in conference speeches.
- Allude to customer stories you’re not allowed to publish in full standard multi-page success story formats.
- Aggregate information about groups of customers – e.g., ten installations over 50 terabytes or 15 sales to retail/CPG.
- Point to information your customers themselves reveal.
What TEMIS is seeing in the marketplace
CEO Eric Bregand of Temis recently checked in by email with an update on text mining market activity. Highlights of Eric’s views include:
- Yep, Voice Of The Customer is hot, in “many markets”; Eric specifically mentioned banking, car, energy, food, and retail. He further sees IBM backing VotC as text’s “killer app.” (Note: Temis has a history of partnering with IBM, most notably via its unusually strong commitment to UIMA.)
- Specifically, THE hot topics in the European market these days are competitive intelligence and sentiment analysis. (Note: I’ve always thought Temis got serious about competitive analysis a little earlier than most other text mining vendors did.)
- Life sciences is an ever growing focus for Temis.
- I confused him a bit with how I phrased my question about custom publishing and Temis’ Mark Logic partnership. But he did express favorable views of the market, specifically in the area of integrating text mining and native XML database management, and even volunteered that nStein appears to be doing well.
| Categories: Application areas, Competitive intelligence, Custom publishing, IBM and UIMA, Investment research and trading, Mark Logic, nStein, TEMIS, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 1 Comment |
FeedBlitz search is totally fried
If you take our integrated feed — and you should* — and you happen to pick the email option, that’s delivered via FeedBlitz. I subscribe myself, of course, and today I happened to check the option “Search Monash Information Services” (Monash Information Services is the name of the feed). That goes to this search page.
*That’s what this link is for. Or this one.
Curious to see how results compared to those from our own cross-site search, I tried a search on a company I write a lot about, namely “Netezza.” Nothing came up. Then I tried “Attensity.” Ditto. And “text mining”. Still nothing. In fact, there aren’t even any results on “Monash”.
I think some repairs may be in order …
| Categories: Blogosphere, Search engines, Social software and online media | 2 Comments |