All posts tagged computational linguistics

January 20, 2010

Semlab lecture at Carisma Workshop

Semlab’s Mark Vreijling will lecture at the pre-conference workshop of News Analytics Applied to Trading, Fund Management and Risk Control, at the 1st of February 2010, London.

The lecture, titled Practical Use of News in Equity Trading Strategies will address issues concerning the possibilities of current technologies to quantify the content of news, how news analytics are to be used and the benefits of automatic news analytics for equity trading strategies.

For more information: Carisma Workshop

 

January 20, 2010

Semlab to research News Optimised Risk Management (NORM)

The European Union has approved our NORM proposal. Semlab and a consortium of international partners will start researching News Optimised Risk Management.

In today’s chaotic financial climate, systems for predicting market behaviour and attitudes of financial professionals are under scrutiny. Current market risk assessment characteristics disregard market information that is available from additional sources like, for example, financial news. There are whole new possibilities for producing meaningful market behaviour models by incorporating behavioural and quantitative finance, using the latest techniques and powerful modelling tools. The prevailing market environment can (to some extent) be captured by key innovative techniques of news analytics that quantify news sentiments. The emergence and impact of such behavioural finance is illustrated by the 4-5 Nobel Prizes for Economics awarded in this field in recent years.

This project aims to enhance market risk assessment metrics by using semantically analysed news-based information. This will compensate for inflexibility of existing models with regard to strong market fluctuations or market instability and give more dynamic, more reliable market risk estimation.

 

June 11, 2009

SemLab’s Semantic Search

The SemLab semantic search platform is based on our Vicore™ data processing platform which, among others, is the basis of our leading semantic news analysis solution ViewerPro™.

The purpose of semantic search is to improve standard keyword-based search technologies by adding domain dependent, a-priory knowledge about the semantics of the concepts entailed in the documents that are analysed. This a-priory knowledge is contained in ontologies: formal descriptions of the concepts that exist in the domain of application. In general the ontologies play a pivotal role in a semantic enabled technology and have a profound effect on its overall quality. For a search platform, the common quality parameters Precision and Recall will largely depend on the quality of the ontologies used.

Semlab’s semantic platform fully acknowledges that ontologies are the key to a successful semantic analysis system and therefore support ontology maintenance as a core technology. This includes both expert knowledge expression as well as (supervised) automatic ontology learning from domain-specific documents. In addition the SemLab platform fully supports existing base ontologies and offers their own default domain ontologies for many areas of financial information management, exactly as are used every day by the ViewerPro semantic news analysis platform.

The SemLab semantic platform is in essence a data pipelining platform in the sense that the data sources are fed to the start of the line, various relatively independent subsequent operations are done on the data. The results of these are stored in various databases.

illustration2

In the case of semantic search, the data sources consist of text documents (e.g. reports, news messages, e-mails) in various formats and the final result is an semantic index, modeling the occurrence of ontology terms in the documents. When a user presents the platform with search query, this query is treated as if it were another document and also expressed in terms of the ontology. Since both the document corpus and the user’s query are expressed within the same domain of discourse, they can be compared and ranked on similarity. Finally, using carefully designed threshold values, the resulting document sections are presented to the user in a GUI or available through an API to other applications. In addition to the retrieval of documents, the domain ontology can also be queried directly. In this way the semantic search platform also serves as a question answering tool, enabling users to quickly retrieve the corporate domain knowledge.

 

March 20, 2009

Welcome to Semlab’s blog

Welcome to Semlab’s blog. Semlab is a research and development company that focuses on knowledge discovery and decision support. Our products include ViewerPro (semantic analysis of economic news) and Meditra (decision suppport for triagist).

This blog will be used to keep you up to date on new developments of our products and research activities in computational linguistics, fuzzy logic, sematic web technologies, user interface design and many other related issues.