June 11, 2008

Expert System S.p.A. update

I chatted with Brooke Aker, the new CEO of Expert System’s US subsidiary, for quite a while last week. Unfortunately, we had some cell phone problems, and email followup hasn’t gone well, so I’m hazy on a few details. But here are some highlights, as best I understood them.

Once again, however, I made it through an Expert System briefing without gaining a real understanding of its technology. I gather they’re proud of their in-memory data structure for their semantic network, but I haven’t a clue (beyond the obvious guesses) as to what that data structure is. Similarly, Brooke said that a distinguishing feature of Expert Systems semantic network is that words have lots of attributes, which are the same thing as categories, and supplied a list of the 11 top-level categories: Objects, animals, plants, people, concepts, places, time, natural phenomena, state, quantity, group. But it’s easy to come up with a lot of things that don’t seem to fit that list very well (especially events, such as numerous different word-senses of “strike”), so absent further elucidation I didn’t find that particularly instructive either.

Comments

2 Responses to “Expert System S.p.A. update”

  1. How much linguisitic sophistication is needed in Voice of the Customer/Market applications? | Text Technologies on June 11th, 2008 7:54 am

    […] who proposed linguistic sophistication as a key reason for beating the competition (which, however, didn’t include Attensity or Clarabridge) at two accounts. The point Brooke was stressing is that it’s important to be able to extract […]

  2. Jeffrey Catlin on June 11th, 2008 12:32 pm

    Just wanted to make a correction to the Expert System assertion that they beat out Lexalytics on this deal. In point of fact, I don’t know which auto companies they are talking about, and can say with 100% confidence that we weren’t one of the companies they (whoever they are) were looking at. No phone calls, and no emails says to me that we weren’t considered on these.

    Jeff Catlin – CEO Lexalytics, Inc.

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