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Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Big data is big business A company founded to commercialise artificial intelligence technology developed at the University of Aberdeen is the most recent contribution made by EPSRC-sponsored researchers to the ‘big data’ revolution. Data2Text was formed four years ago by Professor Ehud Reiter and Dr Yaji Sripada to take forward Natural Language Generation (NLG) research. NLG is a form of artificial intelligence developed to communicate information extracted from complex data sources in natural language, automatically generating written reports which would take expert analysts hours to complete. Professor Reiter says, “The goal is to build ‘articulate machines’ which communicate with people in the same way that other people do. When two engineers or doctors communicate, they may share numbers and graphs, but the core of the communication will be in language, and this approach will enable articulate machines to communicate in exactly the same way”. Data2Text was acquired for a combination of equity and cash by software development business Arria earlier this year. The resulting company, Arria NLG, floated in early December 2013 on the Alternative Investment Market under the symbol NLG, and is currently valued at over £130 million. Further information - www.arria.com
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