Le traitement automatique des langues (enfin) à l’honneur

Confrontée à un volume d’information toujours croissant, l’Europe découvre, ravie, la valeur du traitement automatique des langues, ciment de la construction européenne.

Lors du récent sommet LT-Innovate, Alexander De Croo, vice premier ministre de Belgique et ministre de l’Economie digitale ainsi que Robert Madelin, directeur général de la DG CONNECT à la Commission européenne, ont envoyé un message très clair à la communauté du Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL) : « Nous comprenons aujourd’hui l’importance de votre discipline et le rôle qu’elle joue dans le développement économique de l’Europe. Nous apprécions aussi votre capacité à transformer et adapter votre discours à nos préoccupations économique et politique ».

Ce message, illustré dans les interventions régulières des intervenants politiques, souligne la prise de conscience du rôle fondamental du traitement automatique des langues.

Cette « compréhension déclarée » serait ainsi liée à la transformation du discours de notre discipline envers les autorités. Je n’en suis pas aussi convaincu que cela. Je n’ai pas le sentiment que notre discours ai subitement ou progressivement changé fondamentalement, et ce quelle que soit la discipline concernée, la traduction, la reconnaissance vocale ou encore l’analyse sémantique.

Cette soudaine prise de conscience des autorités européenne me semble être davantage une conséquence de leur difficulté, voire de leur impossibilité à faire face au volume d’information qui les submerge aujourd’hui.

En ce sens, nous pouvons rappeler à la communauté et aux autorités, que l’un des 3 V du Big Data – la Variété - caractérise intrinsèquement la masse des données qu’il faut appréhender et traiter.

C’est bien cet enfant de l’ère numérique qui a éveillé les consciences sur l’importance des données, leur nature, leur diversité, leur masse, pour l’aide à la décision technique, économique et politique.

Cependant, quelles qu’en soient les raisons, cette prise de conscience, dans le contexte du « Digital Agenda for Europe » est une excellente nouvelle pour notre communauté. Celle-ci, rappelons-le, est composée à la fois d’universitaires, mais également d’un grand nombre de PME à travers toute l’Europe. Il apparaît donc aujourd’hui que nous sommes clairement identifiés et reconnus pour nos expertises variées et notre valeur contributive au développement et aux enjeux européens.

Nous le savons, et j’ai pu le vérifier lors de notre réunion annuelle, toutes les entreprises engagées de notre communauté connaissent bien la manière dont elles peuvent contribuer à ce développement stratégique. En revanche, trop nombreuses sont celles qui finissent par baisser les bras au moment de se confronter aux mécanismes administratifs complexes et statutaires de l’Europe. Nous sommes en général des entreprises de petite taille et malheureusement pas toujours correctement équipées pour échanger d’égal à égal avec les autorités Européennes à l’occasion de projets de type H2020 ou autre. Nous avons parfois le sentiment regrettable qu’au cours des 15 dernières années, le fossé entre nous continue inexorablement de se creuser, qu’une communication simple et directe reste toujours difficile et qu’au final, l’Europe ne sait pas nous accompagner.

Il est urgent et impératif que l’Europe assume et entretienne un rôle d’accompagnement stratégique – à l’instar des États-Unis – auprès de nos PME innovantes, de nos start-up, parfois fragiles, afin d’assurer des perspectives de développement pérenne à moyen et long terme. L’Europe doit comprendre l’importance stratégique des technologies innovantes que nous développons pour servir, entre autre, l’indépendance technologique, économique, culturelle et juridique de notre continent européen.

Il est heureux que nos représentants européens prennent conscience de notre existence technologique et de notre valeur associée. Il est temps maintenant que notre Europe administrative se mette à notre hauteur afin de nous apporter une aide active en nous impliquant dans des projets d’exécution et de production. L’un des premiers bénéfices attendus permettrait certainement de simplifier et d’optimiser ses propres rouages administratifs...

Charles Huot est le directeur général délégué et co-fondateur de TEMIS, une société de gestion des données non structurées. TEMIS aide les entreprises à archiver, gérer, analyser, trouver et partager un volume d’informations toujours croissant. Cet article a été publié aussi sur EurActiv.

CABI Automates its Semantic Enrichment Process and Interlinks its Content with TEMIS's Luxid®

CABI chooses the best-in-class semantic content enrichment solution to enhance its content, boost audience engagement, and strategically expand its product line.

TEMIS, the leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment solutions has signed a strategic agreement with CABI, an inter-governmental, not-for-profit organization providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment.

Two key trends that CABI faces as a major publisher of scientific information are the exponential growth rate of the volume of published articles on one hand, and on the other the emergence of the "Web of Data", which is shaping a demand for more structured data products in addition to traditional information products based on content.

To address these trends, CABI has decided to optimize its content indexing which was previously primarily manual, by integrating TEMIS's Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform in its content management workflow. CABI's first objective is to make efficiency gains through automation and reduce indexing costs associated with the increase of content volumes while ensuring high levels of metadata quality. The rich semantic metadata extracted from its content will enable more sophisticated search, navigation and discovery tools on CABI's online portals, promoting greater user engagement. Luxid®'s semantic enrichment pipeline will furthermore enable the extraction from text of structured information as well as semantic relationships, enabling CABI to create linked data products connected to the larger Web of Data.

"As a database publisher with many decades of experience in metadata and content indexing, we are very excited to be working with TEMIS to take our semantic enrichment endeavors to a whole new level. This will allow us to improve existing products, but more importantly to create new value from the rapidly growing content assets within our portfolio. We see this as a major step towards achieving our goal to be the world's leading source of knowledge and insights in agriculture and related disciplines," said Andrea Powell, Executive Director, Publishing, CABI.

The full press release is available here.

TEMIS Selects immixGroup as its Master Distributor for U.S. Government Accounts

immixGroup will help TEMIS bring its semantic enrichment technology to the U.S. Government.

New York, NY – September 17, 2013 – TEMIS, the leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment solutions for the Enterprise, announced today that immixGroup will represent TEMIS for public sector supply schedules making procurement for federal organizations simple, fast and economical. This partnership allows TEMIS channel partners access to supply schedules and enables Federal agencies to unlock unstructured content as part of the President Barak Obama directive to Federal agencies on open data.

"We are excited to open new markets for TEMIS in the Federal space. The potential for TEMIS' market in the public sector is impressive," said Art Richer, President of immixGroup. "Our unique platform of services including strategic demand creation activities and distribution services will give TEMIS partners the resources they need to grow their business, while government agencies will enjoy reliable access to TEMIS products through their preferred contracts and solution providers."

TEMIS' flagship Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform, the recipient of the SIIA's 2013 CODiE Award for Best Semantic Technology Platform, is based on patented natural language processing technology that recognizes and extracts relevant items of information hidden in plain text, such as entities, relationships, topics and categories and enriches content with domain-specific metadata. Luxid® helps organizations to efficiently structure their unstructured information assets, to package and deliver targeted, relevant information to their stakeholders, and to enable the analysis, discovery and sharing of actionable insights to optimize their business.

"As we experienced at the recent White House Data Jam on Open Data, there is a major need for semantic enrichment to unlock government content that has been hard to find, much less manage," said Guillaume Mazieres, TEMIS Executive Vice President for North America. "Our Luxid® platform has proven how unstructured content can reveal critical information, from money laundering to scientific research. In immixGroup, we have found a partner with the integrity, depth and vigor to engage the Federal market place with TEMIS."

About immixGroup, Inc.

immixGroup helps technology companies do business with the government. immixGroup's unique platform of services enables software and hardware manufacturers and their channel partners to grow their public sector business and accelerate the sales cycle. Since 1997, immixGroup has delivered the specialized resources and expertise these companies need to increase their revenue, support their demand creators, and operate efficiently. And government agencies trust immixGroup to provide leading commercial technology products through their preferred contracts and business partners.

To see the full press release

TEMIS Acquires i3 Analytics

TEMIS, the leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment solutions for the Enterprise, has acquired the US-based i3 Analytics, a provider of advanced data analytics and visualization technologies.

Founded in 2011, i3 Analytics provides Biopharma Navigator, an award-winning Software-as-a-Service platform that charts the biopharma landscape based on Life Sciences open data. Providing customers with tailor-made, relevant and intuitive visualization maps, the i3 Analytics' Biopharma Navigator enables Life Sciences professionals to work faster, provide critical information to their peers, and make fast and informed clinical, regulatory, and business decisions.

Awarded "Best Semantic Technology Solution" in January 2013 by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) for its flagship platform Luxid®, TEMIS has developed an in-depth expertise serving the information extraction and semantic enrichment needs of a varied range of industries, including Defence, Publishing & Media, as well as Life Sciences, where demand for easy-to-use, intuitive visualization and analytics tools has been growing in step with the exponential growth of available unstructured content. This acquisition reinforces TEMIS' commitment and capabilities to serving its customers by strengthening its product range with a complementary SaaS Analytics and Discovery offering and expanding its know-how with the integration of a team of former NIH engineers. The acquisition will also enable TEMIS to accelerate its penetration into new application areas in Life Sciences.

"The acquisition of i3 Analytics demonstrates our commitment to the Life Sciences market", said Eric Brégand, CEO of TEMIS. "This transaction creates a best-in-class offering for our Life Sciences customers, based on the winning combination of deep computational linguistics expertise and leading-edge data visualization know-how. And we will be transposing the solution to other verticals where data analytics and information visualization are also becoming critical."

Moving forward, and with a focus on maintaining its commitment to simplicity and innovation, TEMIS will integrate the SaaS Biopharma Navigator into its Luxid® product line and make it available for other application segments.

Full press release

Les Echos Select TEMIS to Enrich and Link Content

TEMIS, the leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment solutions for the Enterprise, today announced it has signed a major license and services agreement with the leading newspaper Les Echos. 

Producing media services focused on economics and finance, arts and culture, and enterprise services, Les Echos have witnessed in recent years a steady shift in the source of their revenues, from decades of print products to more recently a significant and growing share from sales of online content. Les Echos have been a longtime leader in an industry undergoing fundamental changes including the exponential growth of free content, the decline of print, the rise of the tablet and the emergence of a "Web of data." In order to accelerate its digital business development, the group wants to capitalize on its editorial content, creating a series of innovative products and services for new audiences.

To achieve their product development objectives, Les Echos have chosen to deploy Luxid®, the semantic content enrichment platform by TEMIS. Luxid® will enable Les Echos to structure all of the unstructured content published by their various editorial teams (Les Échos, Investir, Enjeux Les Échos, Business). Further, Luxid® will make it possible for the group to easily link similar or related content, make them interoperable by complying with the semantic web standards, and connect them to proprietary or open-source knowledge bases. Semantic metadata produced by Luxid® also will help optimize publication systems and create new offerings. 

"TEMIS solutions will allow us to deploy a full-scale semantic approach, within all the products of the group and autonomously", said Frédéric Filloux, General Manager in charge of digital activities at Les Echos. "Furthermore, TEMIS will extend us the benefit of the experience they've acquired with economic and financial content. Lastly, Luxid® is an evolutive solution that enables the integration of open source knowledge bases with international standards such as IPTC. These are key benefits in a fast-moving digital environment where enriching content with semantic metadata has become an essential step in bringing out its full value."

"We are delighted that Les Echos have chosen TEMIS to assist their team in this digital shift", said Vincent Nibart, Sales Director – Publishing France, TEMIS. "TEMIS is renowned in the publishing sector for its know-how in semantic content enrichment and recently took a leap forward in terms of projects in the press sector thanks to major projects conducted with Gannett (USA Today) and Agence France Presse." 

Based on patented and award-winning Natural Language Processing technologies, Luxid® exploits off-the-shelf extractors called Skill Cartridges® to extract targeted information from unstructured content and semantically enrich it with domain-specific metadata. This enables professional publishers to efficiently package and deliver relevant information to their audience, and helps enterprises to intelligently archive, manage, analyze, discover and share increasing volumes of information.

The full Press Release.

TEMIS unveils Luxid® for Microsoft SharePoint 2013

TEMIS, the leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment solutions for the Enterprise and member of LT-Innovate network, announced that its Luxid® for SharePoint 2013 integration will become commercially available as of today. Luxid® for SharePoint 2013 is an integration of TEMIS' flagship Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform into SharePoint 2013.

Based on patented and award-winning technology, Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform is a powerful and scalable content enrichment solution that natively supports 20 languages and exploits specialized engines called Skill Cartridges® to automatically extract relevant topics, entities, facts, sentiments, or categories from documents and generate rich metadata. This semantic metadata, stored in SharePoint 2013 columns, is then freely available for use by any application, opening new perspectives for content management, archival, business process automation, analytics and search. Luxid® includes a library of off-the shelf Skill Cartridges® that address areas of recurring interest, as well as a suite of productivity tools that help customize them and create new ones that are relevant to customer business areas.

"This second-generation integration will help enable our customers to deploy semantic enrichment industrially on their SharePoint 2013 farms", said Michaël Domanski, Alliances and Channel Manager, TEMIS. "The domain-specific metadata produced by Luxid® is now available for search services, for the Term Store as well as the entire application layer."

Luxid® for SharePoint 2013 is a second-generation integration that builds on the same foundations as the TEMIS' Luxid® for SharePoint 2010 integration, with significant extensions in key functional areas based on customer feedback:

• Seamless integration with SharePoint 2013
  Luxid® for SharePoint 2013 is a server application that is seamlessly accessed through Web Services, reads documents, extracts relevant metadata based on their Content Type and feeds it into the corresponding SharePoint 2013 columns. This alleviates end-user manual contribution efforts and enhances the quantity and quality of metadata. Depending on governance policies, metadata may remain accessible for end user modification thanks to habitual SharePoint 2013 views. 
• Industrial configuration and deployment
  Thanks to a rich set of configuration interfaces, all relevant Luxid® content enrichment service parameters – such as Content Type definitions, corresponding Managed Metadata and Managed Properties - can be configured through Luxid® for SharePoint 2013 menus, streamlining to a matter of minutes the mechanics of deployment to an entire SharePoint 2013 farm. Luxid® for SharePoint 2013 also preserves the history of manual metadata modifications for audit purposes.
• Advanced Term Store integration
  Luxid® for SharePoint 2013 enables full, two-way integration with the SharePoint Term Store. When implemented in the context of a closed Term Set, Luxid® applies the Term Set to content, enabling precise institutional governance over – managed - metadata through an Enterprise taxonomy. In the case of open Term Sets, Luxid® identifies concepts beyond a pre-ordained list, as they appear in the content, a process that supports the enrichment or feeding of an enterprise taxonomy based on actual enterprise content.
• Native application integration 
  Stored in SharePoint columns, the metadata produced by Luxid® for SharePoint 2013 becomes natively accessible to any application – in particular for content management, business process automation, information access or analytical tasks. As an example, exploiting Managed Properties or Managed Metadata, any SharePoint 2013 search service may seamlessly index this metadata and present rich faceted navigation interfaces structured according to end-users' enterprise taxonomy. Other features that can be built include contextual navigation, content recommendation engines and analytical widgets. 

More information