Meaningful text mining

Insightful has released InFact, a text mining solution for information retrieval that the company believes is currently the only commercial technology of its kind to embody human-like intelligence.

The company says InFact consists of 20 sub-systems, most of which were originally developed by Insightful for U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Insightful claims InFact is able to achieve a human-like understanding of text and modifies its behavior and responses accordingly. Because it can peruse millions of documents a day, claims the company, InFact provides accurate, reliable and actionable answers and analyses not practical with human workers and not possible with competing technologies.

The InFact solution is a stand-alone system that can support any enterprise network or knowledge store(s), regardless of operating system, legacy applications or data formats, say Insightful. It adds that the system can ingest into a single database any and all of a company’s knowledgebase. Further, says the company, InFact handles text, image and numerical data in any common format, structured or unstructured. InFact will return the best direct answers to questions, with links directly into the source document. Results are in the multimedia form that best answers the question: text, charts, images, maps, tables, etc. When a direct answer is not available in the underlying content, InFact can generate a precise, analyzed/synthesized answer.

Insightful says InFact embodies human-like intelligence by processing and retrieving knowledge in a manner similar to the human brain. Semantic and syntactic methods understand the meaning of each sentence and the context of each word within a sentence and can make complex associations across the entire knowledgebase.

The company explains that automated, incremental indexing techniques eliminate manual metatagging or model training, enabling InFact to handle new content easily Statistical representations of concepts derived are language-independent, thereby enabling the location of relevant facts within documents without translation.

InFact is available today for Sun Solaris systems. An InFact license for a single knowledge management system starts at $250,000.