Swedish language support (natural language processing) for IBM Content Analytics (ICA)

Findwise has now extended the NLP (natural language processing) in ICA to include both support for Swedish PoS tagging and Swedish sentiment analysis.

IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search (ICA) has its strength in natural language processing (NLP) which is achieved in the UIMA pipeline. From a Swedish perspective, one concern with ICA has always been its lack of NLP for Swedish. Previously the Swedish support in ICA consisted only of dictionary-based lemmatization (word: “sprang” -> lemma: “springa”). However, for a number of other languages ICA has also provided part of speech (PoS) tagging and sentiment analysis. One of the benefits of the PoS tagger is its ability to disambiguate words, which belong to multiple classes (e.g. “run” can be both a noun and a verb) as well as assign tags to words, which are not found in the dictionary. Furthermore, the POS tagger is crucial when it comes to improving entity extraction, which is important when a deeper understanding of the indexed text is needed.

Findwise has now extended the NLP in ICA to include both support for Swedish PoS tagging and Swedish sentiment analysis. The two images below shows simple examples of the PoS support.

Example when ICA uses NLP to analyse the string "ICA är en produkt som klarar entitetsextrahering"Example when ICA uses NLP to analyse the string "Watson deltog i jeopardy"

The question is how this extended functionality could be used?

IBM uses ICA and its NLP support together with several of their products. The jeopardy playing computer Watson may be the most famous example, even if it is not a real product. Watson used NLP in its UIMA pipeline when it analyzed its data from sources such as Wikipedia and Imdb.

One product which leverage from ICA and its NLP capabilities is Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare. This product helps doctors to determine which action to take for a patient given the patient’s journal and the symptoms. By also leveraging the predictive analytics from SPSS it is possible to suggest the next action for the patient.

ICA can also be connected directly to IBM Cognos or SPSS where ICA is the tool which creates structure to unstructured data. By using the NLP or sentiment analytics in ICA, structured data can be extracted from text documents. This data can then be fed to IBM Cognos, SPSS or non IBM products such as Splunk.

ICA can also be used on its own as a text miner or a search platform, but in many cases ICA delivers its maximum value together with other products. ICA is a product which helps enriching data by creating structure to unstructured data. The processed data can then be used by other products which normally work with structured data.

SLTC 2012 in retrospect – two cutting-edge components

The 4th Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC) was held in Lund on 24-26 October 2012.
It is a biennial event organized by prominent research centres in Sweden.
The conference is, therefore, an excellent venue to exchange ideas with Swedish researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), as well as present own research and be updated of the state-of-the-art in most of the areas of Text Analytics (TA).

This year Findwise participated in two tracks – in a workshop and in the main conference.
As the area of Search Analytics (SA) is very important to us, we decided to be proactive and sent an application to organize a workshop on the topic of “Exploratory Query Log Analysis” in connection with the main conference. The application was granted and the workshop was very successful. It gathered researchers who work in the area of SA from very different perspective – from utilizing deep Machine Learning to discover users’ intent,  to looking at query logs as a totally new genre. I will do a follow-up on that in another post. All the contributions to the workshop will also be uploaded on our research page.

As for the main conference, we had two papers accepted for presentation. The first one dealt with the topic of document summarization – both single and multidocument summarization
(http://www.slideshare.net/findwise/extractive-document-summarization-an-unsupervised-approach).
The second paper was about detecting Named Enities in Swedish
(http://www.slideshare.net/findwise/identification-of-entities-in-swedish).

These two papers presented de facto state-of-the-art results for Swedish both when it comes to document summarization and Named Entity Recognition (NER). As for the former task, there is neither a standard corpus for evaluation of summarization systems, nor many previous results and just few other systems which made it unfeasible to compare our own system with. Thus, we have contributed two things to the research in document summarization – a Swedish corpus based on featured Wikipedia articles to be used for evaluation and a system based on unsupervised Machine Learning, which by relying on domain boosting achieves state-of-the-art results for English and Swedish. Our system can be further improved by relying on our enhanced NER and Coreference resolution modules.

As for the NER paper, our Entity recognition system for Swedish achieves 74.0% F-score, which is 4% higher than another study presented simultaneously at SLTC (http://www.ling.su.se/english/nlp/tools/stagger). Both systems were evaluated on the same corpus, which is considered a de facto standard for evaluation of different NLP resources for Swedish. The unlabelled score (i.e. no fine-grained division of classes but just entity vs non-entity) of our system achieved 91.3% F-score (93.1% Precision and 89.6% Recall). When identifying people, the Findwise NER system achieves 78.1% Precision and 90.5% Recall (83.9% F-score).

So, what did we take home from the conference? We were really happy to see that the tools we develop for our customers are not something mediocre but rather something that is of very high quality and is the state-of-the-art in Swedish NLP. We actively share our results and our corpora for research perposes. Findwise showed keen interest in cooperating with other researchers in developing better tools and systems in the area of NLP and Text Analytics. And this I think is a huge bonus to all our current and prospective customers – we actively follow the current trends in the research community and cooperate with researchers, and our products do incorporate the latest findings in the field, which make us leverage both high quality and cutting-edge technology.

As we continuously improve our products, we have also released a Polish NER and some work has been initiated on Danish and Norwegian ones. More NLP components will be soon available for demo and testing on our research page.

Search as a Tool for Information Quality Assurance

Feedback from stakeholders in ongoing projects has highlighted the real need for a supporting tool to assist in the analysis of large amounts of content. This would introduce a phase where super-users and information owners have the possibility to go through a information quality assurance process across the information silos, before releasing information directly to end users.

Using standard features contained within enterprise search platforms, great value can be delivered as well as time saved in extracting essential information. Furthermore, you have the possibility to detect key information objects that are hidden by a lack of a holistic view.

In this way adapted applications can easily be built on top to support process specific analysing demands e.g. through entity extraction (automatic detection and extraction of names, places, dates etc) and cross-referencing unstructured and structured sources. The time is here to gain control of your enterprise information, the information quality and turn it into knowledge.