Digital Reasoning, a provider of solutions for complex, large-scale unstructured data analytics, announced it has been issued a U.S. patent for its distributed system of intelligent software agents for discovering the meaning in text. The invention enables the extraction of meaning from text as humans do it - by analyzing concepts and entities in context. According to the company, the software learns as it runs, continually comparing new text to existing knowledge. Associated entities and synonym relationships are automatically discovered and relevant documents are identified from across extremely large corpora.
"Essentially, what this deals with is, how do you construct a model of what words mean, based on how they are used in context, in documents? That is kind of the building block to making systems able to read material and understand what the material is about in a more human-like way without actually having a predesigned dictionary or ontology or some structural target that you use to fit against. It is basically about letting the data speak for itself and that is the approach that is the foundation for the company," Tim Estes, CEO and founder of Digital Reasoning, as well as the named inventor on Data Analytics' patents, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
The era of machine reading is beginning, Estes notes. "The next frontier we think is this analysis and understanding of unstructured data, and doing that without any prior model."
The new patent specifically covers the mechanism of measurement and the applications of algorithms to develop machine-understandable structures from patterns of symbol usage. In addition, it covers the semantic alignment of those learned structures from unstructured data with pre-existing structured data - a necessary step in creating enterprise-class entity-oriented systems. The technology as implemented in Synthesys provides a unique and now protected means of bringing automated understanding to end users in the enterprise and beyond, according to the company.
Digital Reasoning recently announced a strategic investment, licensing, and development agreement from In-Q-Tel, an investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. intelligence community. The transaction will make Digital Reasoning's technology available for use within that community.
"Our patents and recent strategic agreement with IQT will help us to accelerate our vision of helping decision makers discover, visualize and act on important information that may not be readily apparent or is buried in different and disparate data sources," says Estes.
The new patent, #7,882,055 along with patent #7,249,117, which was awarded in 2007, are the foundation for the company's flagship product, Synthesys, an entity oriented cloud-scale analytic solution that enables enterprises and government agencies to automatically make sense of complex data. Built to address the most complicated data analytics challenges Synthesys excels at extracting, resolving and linking entities and concepts from unstructured and structured data. By uncovering hidden connections, the company says, the system enables analysts to make smart decisions faster.
More information is available about Synthesys and Digital Reasoning.