Arria NLG PLC (LON:NLG) Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Gould caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their 7th US patent, how this sets them apart from competitors, how work is progressing with Genpact and what to look out for in the coming months
Q1: First off, congratulations on Arria NLG’s 7th US patent, the third this year alone. Can you tell us what this one entails?
A1: It entails something so seemingly simple for people who actually communicate in language that it might seem almost surprising so what it covers is the natural language generation of a sentence that refers to a single thing in a number of ways so whilst it’s got a very technical term, just think about your language every day. Think about a power plant where there’s a bit of rotating equipment and you want to talk about that piece of rotating equipment as though you were an engineer, well an engineer when they’re talking about a piece of equipment will have something called a ‘referring expression’. So they’re talking about ‘a thing’ and when they talk about that thing they don’t want to keep using the full and exact name of that thing so the last thing they’re going to say is ‘currently on Turbine XYZ the temperature has peaked’, ‘Turbine XYZ should be fixed’, ‘Turbine XYZ needs to be lubricated’, ‘Turbine XYZ needs to be turned off for that repair to happen’. What the engineer will do to communicate the sense of something going wrong will put all of those descriptions together or name that thing in different ways so ‘piece of equipment XYZ’ in the first part of the sentence and then it will be ‘it’ in the second or it’ll be ‘the compressor’ or ‘the turbine’ later on in the sentence and paragraph. Doing what your mind does naturally when it’s constructing information about something, about a thing, we do it all the time, every day, it’s so natural to us we don’t even think about it, it’s totally part of our unconscious natural language process. Here we have patented the ability of an algorithm, a heuristic NLG platform to do it for you, for the machine, for the big data, for the internet so any time that we want the internet to speak to generate a phrase from scratch, to not use pre-prepared template that someone has written, they will probably need a ‘referring expression’ in order that it sounds natural and not like a robot or like mail merge on steroids and that’s where this patent comes in.
Q2: So how does this set you apart from your competitors?
A2: That’s a great question so there’s a number of firms out there that profess to have natural language generation and they’re quite good. Some of them or most of them come from robot-journalism school, most of them use, if we look at the sort of technology that they’re putting into the marketplace, pure template systems so they use statistical NLG if you like, they look for an issue then they look for a phrase to use in a bank of phrases to describe a phenomena. That works to a degree but it’s quite limited, you’ve got to have envisaged all of the different scenarios that your portfolio report might need to be report on or your health diagnostics report might need to report on and right them up and pre-plan them and write a template so you get very template text, you get very stilted text, you tend to get short text, if you look at lots of them you’ll see they repeat the same thing over and over, again you get mail merge on steroids. So that’s what most of our competition do, it works, it works well in certain circumstances, you can get a fair way with it, you can’t do it on mass, you can’t do millions of rich narrative reports in natural language in seconds so well that are all varied and created from scratch. To do that you need the IP that Arria is building, you need that heuristic set of tools, natural language tools, that we’re building that are coming from the minds of the guys who originally defined the field, Dr Robert Dale, Professor Ehud Reiter and Dr Yaji Sripada, the founders of the field. So we’re busy commercialising their work, their technology and it’s that that really sets us apart so the patents set us apart but that all comes down to the underlying science that we’ve got. The ultimate expression of it is much more natural language, much more realistic ways for the internet to speak.
Q3: Now Arria NLG has had a busy start to the year with 3 patents already and 2 new clients, Genpact and the US utility company, can you tell us how work with those clients is coming along and what else should we be looking for in the coming months?
A3: Well Genpact is going very well, we’ve just got a team in Hyderabad at the moment. Remember Genpact’s a channel for us so we’re going via Genpact to their huge global series of Fortune 1000 companies, it’s really exciting work, it’s so interesting to see a whole range of solutions for our NLG platform especially the financial planning and analytics. So we’re seeing their analytics experts being embodied into our machine, we’re putting the minds of their experts into the machine and we’re seeing their clients beginning to light up at the possibilities of having that real time explanation of what’s going on in their businesses available to them. So not just charts, not just dashboards, real explanations in real time that have usually or historically taken big teams of people to do over week, if not months. So for us, the team at Arria NLG has been building this stuff for decades but really 3 or 4 years, it’s so exciting to see our technology making a real difference.
