TheySay Unveils Advanced Natural Language Parser

LONDON, Nov. 19, 2013 -- TheySay Ltd., a text and sentiment analytics company, has introduced an advanced natural language parser.

According to TheySay co-founder Professor Stephen Pulman, 'parsing' is the process of discovering the grammatical structure of sentences, e.g., the subject, object, main verb, and modifiers.

"It's paramount to be able to distinguish the structural and semantic difference between sentences like "bacteria kill many people" and "this product kills bacteria" so that the first can be interpreted computationally as largely negative and the second as more positive even though both involve the negative concepts of "killing" and "bacteria," said Pulman.

Pulman added that the TheySay parser was built in order to surmount limitations in open source parsers. These limitations are typically slow processing and maximum sentence lengths.

The result, said Pulman, is a high-performance parser up to 20 times faster than the most widely used open source parsers, and doesn't impose any maximum sentence length limits while offering industry leading accuracy levels.

"In practice, this means that more data can be handled faster by TheySay's analytics services, yielding even greater aggregated sentiment, intent, risk, and speculation predictions," said Pulman.

TheySay CEO David Morgan added that from a business perspective, large volumes of unstructured textual data represent a goldmine of potential insights into what consumers and customers think and feel in real time.

"Our new parser tackles this volume and helps unlock this potential," said Morgan. "One customer has used TheySay technology to augment human analysis of doctors' hospital reports and is managing to carry out the work of 60 analysts with a team of six."

About TheySay

London-based TheySay, established in 2011 and co-founded by Stephen Pulman and Karo Moilanen, develops leading edge text and sentiment analytics software and solutions based on advanced computational linguistics and machine learning techniques. Global customers encompass a wide array of vertical markets, some of which include financial services, healthcare and media. TheySay also works with leading systems integrators. The company has customers in healthcare, financial services, and media worldwide, and works with leading systems integrators.

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