Apples, Yoda and Natural Language Processing - Headup's widget understands the language on your blog

Jan. 18, 2010 - PRLog -- SEMANTIC WEB startup Semantinet has announced the launch of its Headup context based Natural Language Processing engine. Headup utilizes context and grammatical structure to identify topics mentioned on the web and to provide complementary content related to them. It's freely available as a widget from the http://Headup.com website.

Language is deceptive, especially if you’re an Apple
Language is at times ambiguous and confusing. So much so that understanding it can be challenging even for humans. Consider the following example:

“Apple, answered Steve, is my favorite”

The possibilities of interpreting this sentence vary depending on which “Apple” and which “Steve” we’re talking about. If you follow technology news, you’re likely to infer the “Apple” in question is the company and “Steve”, therefore, is Steve Jobs, its founder. If however you lack this knowledge, your interpretation of the sentence is limited to understanding that a guy called Steve likes apples.

The difficulties humans have in understanding the ambiguous usage of language pose a barrier to achieving Natural Language Processing via computers. There are a number of companies working at bringing this about, with mixed results. Headup stands above the crowd due to its promising results and readily available widgets, which all can enjoy via download from the http://Headup.com site.

How Semantinet succeeded teaching computers to understand English
Semantinet's Headup, tells us the company's CTO Tal Muskal, is based on some of the principles humans utilize for understanding language correctly. When attempting to understand any given term Headup refers to its knowledge of the world. Granting it this knowledge was achieved by connecting it to a model of the billions of connections existing between over 30 million nouns, names, topics, and things.

Muskal stresses Headup's strength is not only the size and flexibility of its knowledge base, but also its approach to texts it analyzes. It searches for contextual connections not only across words and sentences, but in larger portions of the text as well.

"Grammar, Yoda teaches, a powerful tool for obscuring meaning is"
Conversely when used correctly it becomes a tool in understanding context and meaning. Muskal's team incorporated a model of the English language’s grammar into Headup, thereby greatly improving its basic linguistic understanding. This process can be replicated in future with other languages as well.

Understanding as a key to relevance
Headup's widgets utilize their Natural Language Processing capabilities to enrich the blogs on which they're installed with relevant complementary content. Blogs using Headup are guaranteed a dynamic feed of videos, images, events, Tweets and more. The widget is free and registration is optional. A demo is provided on the Headup.com site and further details are available from the Headup twitter account (http://twitter.com/headup).

# # #

Headup.com is a content enrichment platform that analyzes web content, identifies key terms & automatically provides related material from social sites & top web services. Headup is developed by SemantiNet, a startup developing Semantic Web applications.