Linguistic Agents Ltd.'s Streaming Logic: Smart Talker

Computerworld - Linguistic Agents Ltd. Streaming Logic

As computers become integrated into everyday activities, better interaction is needed between man and machine. Unfortunately, the two dont speak the same language.

To ease this interaction, privately held Linguistic Agents Ltd. in Jerusalem developed Streaming Logic, a technology that converts natural language into a form that computers can understand. The process involves knowledge and application of both linguistics theory and computer programming.

The goal was to comprehend the latest linguistic theories that explain natural language and turn those abstract theories into a set of rules, says Sasson Margaliot, founder and CEO of Linguistic Agents.

Streaming Logic takes a statement in natural language and parses it to determine what linguists call its logical form, an orderly representation of the meaning of a sentence. The software then automatically converts this into an XML format that can be used by other applications. Margaliot and his chief scientist, Alexandre Demidov, led a team that spent five years developing Streaming Logic. Five iterations later, a beta version of the software was released late last year.

The company is focusing its initial efforts on providing more accurate search engine results, enhancing online advertising and creating better interfaces for content-rich Web sites, says Margaliot. Other features will include automated information services that understand and respond to queries and improved voice-recognition accuracy.

More and more people are getting online who are not computer literate, but who need to interact with data and applications in whatever their [native] language is, says Ann Grackin, CEO of ChainLink Research Inc., a supply chain management consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.

Other natural language processors have been on the market for years, but Grackin says Streaming Logic is unique in the way it analyzes the relationships between words to determine the logical form. That form and the meaning it contains are the same, no matter what language the speaker uses. Because of the language structures, you can port from one language to another, she says.

Margaliot says the company is refining and expanding the English semantic database and plans to add languages. The software will most likely become an embedded feature of other applications such as business intelligence and ERP systems. Since it does the parsing of natural language into machine language, the software will make it easier for developers to create applications by reducing the time spent defining and tagging words that a speaker might use to interact with the application.

Its time to change the way we interact with software and make it more intuitive, says Margaliot. What can be more intuitive than natural language?

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