Cognition, the creator of Cognition’s Semantic NLP™, the semantic natural language processing technology, just announced the commercial release of its technology and software. Here’s their summary of what they do:

Cognition‘s Semantic NLP “understands” word and phrase meanings in modern computer applications, including on the Web. Applications employing Cognition’s technologies are more human-like in their understanding of language, which translates into increased functionality, greater precision and a more robust user experience.

Cognition’s Semantic NLP solves the problem of information glut found in most technologies that work with vast amounts of text. Web-based applications are one example of a text-intensive application in which very little understanding of the content is available. With Cognition’s semantic technology, vast amounts of text can be mined, analyzed, searched and acted upon with greater precision, completeness and understanding. This results in a competitive edge to companies that employ Cognition’s Semantic NLP technology.

“No other commercially available natural language processing technology comes close to Cognition in its breadth and depth of understanding the English language,” said Scott Jarus, CEO of Cognition Technologies.

Companies using Cognition’s Semantic NLP discover that:

• Their technology products are made smarter, more interactive and provide a richer user experience;
• They can differentiate their user experience from competitors by providing simultaneously increased precision (more relevant) and recall (more complete) of information;
• When used in the legal industry, they are able to lower attorney review costs by nearly 50% and minimize the risk of missing relevant data by employing Cognition’s rich dictionary of synonyms and phrase relationships;
• When used within call centers, they can reduce call response times by up to 25%, maximize self-service support and increase customer satisfaction; and
• When applied to Web advertising placement, Cognition matches more ads, and at the same time, matches them more accurately, resulting in increased revenue through higher click-through rates.

Cognition is driving revenue on multiple fronts, including the licensing of its Semantic NLP technology to content owners for meaning-based Search within an enterprise and on the Web. In addition, the company has licensed its technology for specialized use within specific vertical markets, such as health and legal.

Technological Advantage Over Competition (according to Cognition)

“One of the most daunting tasks in building a natural language understanding system is to build the semantic map and the dictionary with details of the syntactic behavior of words (i.e. how words behave within context),” added Mr. Jarus. “Cognition’s team has spent more than 20 years building this capability into Cognition’s Semantic NLP for the English language.”

Other NLP companies, such as Powerset™ and Hakia™, are attempting to achieve the same results which are now immediately available through Cognition’s Semantic NLP technology. Cognition’s technology differentiates itself from its competitors by delivering on the following capabilities:

• The disambiguation of words – Cognition interprets words with different meanings in different contexts (leads to better precision). For example, the text “Did they adopt the bill?” is known by Cognition to relate to information about “the approval of Proposition A”, because “adopt” in the text means “to approve”, and “bill” in the text means “a proposed law”.
• Synonym awareness – Cognition recognizes different words and phrases with the same meaning within context (leads to better recall). For example, when Cognition sees “pay raises”, it figures out the meanings of “pay” and “raise”, but also knows the synonyms “salary increases”, “wage hikes”, etc.
• Understands hypernyms (larger word concepts that can have more specific words that relate to them, e.g., “color” is a hypernym of “green”, “red” and “blue”) and hyponyms (words that relate to a larger concept, e.g., “red”, “green” and “blue” are hyponyms of the word “color”) – Cognition has an ontology and taxonomy for English such that almost all of the hypernym and hyponym relationships are mapped out (leads to better recall).
• Grammatical behavior awareness – Cognition has details of the grammatical behavior of virtually all words to assist Cognition’s advanced parser in assigning grammatical structure to sentences (leads to better parsing and precision).

Cognition’s Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies add word and phrase meaning and understanding to computer applications, providing a technology and/or end-user with actionable content based upon a semantic knowledge of the language. This understanding results in simultaneously much higher precision and recall of salient data within the universe of possible results.

Cognition’s Semantic NLPTM makes technologies and applications more human-like in their understanding of language, thereby resulting in more robust applications, greater user satisfaction and new capabilities available for exploitation. On the Web in particular, powering applications with Cognition’s semantic understanding technology drives these applications ever closer to Web 3.0 (the semantic Web).

Cognition. Giving technologies new meaning.™