Tag Archives: Deep Content

Polymath Service Provider

Over the Christmas break I started to reflect on the nature of service provision in the Language Services industry in the light of new technologies coming out of machine learning and artificial intelligence advances and my own predictions of the influences upon the industry and the industry’s response to them.

There are the recent announcements of adaptive and neural network machine translation; pervasive cloud platforms with ubiquitous connectivity and cognitive capabilities; an upsurge in low-cost, high-benefit open source tooling and frameworks; and many mature api’s and standards.

All of these sophisticated opportunities really do mean that as a company providing services you have to be informed, adaptable, and agile; employ clever, enthusiastic people; and derive joy and satisfaction from harnessing disruptive influences to the benefit of yourselves and your customers.

I do have concerns: How do we sustain the level of investment necessary to stay abreast of all these influences and produce novel services and solutions from them in an environment of very small margins and low tolerance to increased or additional costs?

Don’t get me wrong though. Having spent the last 10 years engaging with world-class research centers such as ADAPT, working alongside thought leading academics and institutions such as DFKI and InfAI, participating in European level Innovation Actions and Projects, and generally ensuring that our company has the required awareness, understanding and expertise, I continue to be positive and enthusiastic in my approach to these challenges.

I am satisfied that we are active in all of the spaces that industry analysts see as being currently significant. To whit: ongoing evaluations of adaptive translation environments and NMT, agile platforms powered by distributed services and serverless architectures, Deep Content (semantic enrichment and NLP), and Review Sentinel (machine learning and text classification).

Less I sound complacent, we have much more in the pipeline and my talented and knowledgeable colleagues are excited for the future.

Succession and Invention

Congratulations to Melanie Howes who was appointed to Vistatec’s DevOps Manager on 21st November and for her sins took over the day to day management of our Applied Technology Group. This is another significant step in Vistatec’s on-going reorganization aimed at enabling further stable growth, continued operational excellence and faster execution of strategic initiatives.

Having handed over operational responsibility for the highly successful group that I have grown over the last few years I would like to assert that the rumours of me being put out to stud or dispatched to the knackers yard are unfounded. You can take it on authority that I’ll be dedicating the additional bandwidth to increasing the velocity with which we operationalize more of our skunk works projects. Those of you that know me will already know the areas that I’m actively researching and evaluating but I also hope to keep a few surprises up my sleeve.

Next week I will continue my evangelism of Deep Content. This week I spent a couple of days in Bonn presenting on one of the services that underpins Deep Content: an internationalization round-tripping service which enables HTML5 to be machine translated and semantically enriched in-place without any special preparation.

Deep Content: The Value Proposition

In May of this year Google announced Rich Cards: a mechanism whereby their search engine mines structured information within web pages and from that harvested data, builds, renders and prominently displays a visually distinctive panel or card at the top of its search results list.

It is obviously very desirable for manufactures, marketers and publishers to have the items they are promoting placed in front of consumers in such a distinguishing manner. A barrier to this for many companies is the necessity for the product information or article being promoted to be structured and annotated in accordance with the comprehension of the Rich Card bot.

Vistatec’s Deep Content is designed to facilitate the creation of multilingual Rich Card-ready content with little or no human intervention! Deep Content can:

  • automatically annotate content articles containing product names or terms with the required Rich Card annotations;
  • be customized for a particular organization;
  • search future-proof your content.

Deep Content on Tour

I have just returned from presenting Deep Content on both coasts of North America at the TAUS Annual Conference in Portland, Oregon and the 32nd Localization World in Montréal, Canada.

mepresenting  deepcontent

Deep Content is the combination of natural language processing (NLP) tools and Linked Data. Services such as terminology spotting, Named Entity Recognition (NER) and machine translation can consume and produce data in a common protocol called Natural Language Processing Interchange Format (NIF). A digital text document is sent to each of the services either individually or sequentially in a pipeline. Entities identified by the various services are passed to a graph query service which searches for related information. Finally all of this data is used to enrich the document.

Deep Content uses open standards and enriched content can be serialized as valid HTML 5 and made available as any other page on the web.

We are currently running some beta pilot projects with customers and I’ll post on their results soon. If you’d like to know more leave a comment.