Features

Covering text analytics software, market, conference, and other news and developments to help KDnuggets readers better understand advances in Knowledge Discovery in Text...

Software

Orchestr8 released on June 18 a significant upgrade to its AlchemyAPI content analysis online service. According to the company, the update includes expanded language coverage (adding Portuguese and Swedish), enhanced text categorization, and integration with Linked Data standards. "AlchemyAPI is a web-based service that enriches a publisher's content through automated tagging, categorization, and semantic analysis available as both a free online API and commercial subscription service."

Attensity Group announced on July 8 the availability of its new, hosted Survey Advantage service at a $5,000 per month point of entry. Attensity Survey Advantage "enables departments within large organizations and government agencies to measure, chart and understand customer sentiment and top issues expressed in customer feedback surveys."

Book

Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper was published in June 2009. "This book offers a highly accessible introduction to Natural Language Processing, the field that underpins a variety of language technologies ranging from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. You'll learn how to write Python programs to analyze the structure and meaning of texts, drawing on techniques from the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence." Visit O'Reilly for information.

Conferences

A joint conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing will be held August 2-7, 2009 in Singapore. ACL-IJCNLP 2009 will cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to natural language and computation.

The 2009 conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL) will include a workshop on the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), September 30, 2009, in Potsdam, Germany. "Participants are invited to present applications realized using UIMA, general experiences using UIMA as a platform for natural language processing, as well as technical papers on particular aspects of the UIMA framework. Alternatives to and comparisons of other frameworks - e.g. GATE, LingPipe, etc. - with UIMA are of interest, too."

The third IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing is slated to be held September 14-16, 2009 in Berkeley, California. ICSC 2009 is "an international forum for researchers and practitioners to present research that advances the state of the art and practice of Semantic Computing, as well as identifying the emerging research topics and defining the future of the field."

Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing RANLP 2009 is slated for September 14-16, 2009 in Borovets, Bulgaria, preceded by September 12-13 tutorials and followed by associated workshops September 17-18.

The ACM Eighteenth Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009) will take place in Hong Kong, November 2-6, 2009. The conference is sponsored by ACM SIGIR and SIGWEB.

Language and Technology Conference 2009: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics (LTC 2009) will take place November 6-8 in Poznan, Poland. "Human Language Technologies (HLT) continue to be a challenge for computer science, linguistics and related fields as these areas become an ever more essential element of our everyday technological environment... [creating] a favorable climate for the intensive exchange of novel ideas, concepts and solutions across initially distant disciplines."

Text Analysis Conference ( TAC 2009) workshops will be held November 16-17, 2009 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, co-located with the Text REtrieval Conference ( TREC), November 17-20, 2009.

Mining User-Generated Content for Security ( MINUCS 2009) will take place December 9, 2009, in Venice, Italy, colocated with the First International Conference on User Centric Media ( UCMedia 2009) in Venice, 9-11 December 2009. "The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry who develop technologies for mining open-source user-generated textual data on the Web, as well as end-users interested in exploiting such technologies for knowledge discovery. The emphasis is placed on large-scale text mining systems..."