Powering intelligent search to derive insights

Cognitive search and analytics can provide organization with unique business advantages over rivals. It can drive effective customer self-service, provide customer support teams with necessary and timely insights, and unlock important information necessary to drive innovation in your enterprise.

KMWorld recently held a webinar featuring Scott Parker, director of product marketing, Sinequa; Basker Krishnan, president and CEO, CogniVision; and David Seuss, CEO, Northern Light, who discussed where, when, and how to use cognitive search and analytics within the organization.

According to Parker, Gartner defines the digital workplace as a “business strategy to boost employee engagement and agility through a more consumerized work environment.” Information is the key pillar of the digital workplace.

However, with gathering this information comes a few challenges. Siloed, scattered, and changing data make information hard to find, Parker said. The average employee wastes 1.8 hours a day searching for information. Refining raw data into information means missed insights and throwing employee time away means losing data value.

Intelligent search makes it easier for companies to find relevant information and store the right data, Parker explained. It can:

• Handle big-data volume, unstructured variety, and all architectures
• Identify user intent and needs dynamically
• Apply AI, natural language processing, and machine learning to content and query
• Enable and learns industry use cases
• Improve user experience with fast responses

The human brain is a phenomenal image processing and pattern recognition engine, Krishnan said. An MIT study has proven that the human brain can process: Entire images that the eye sees in as little as 13 milliseconds. Searching images is hundreds of times faster than reading text.

The human brain operates in an analog world, storing and recognizing information as generalized snapshots rather than detailed text. Yet search engines typically display results largely as text, with emphasis on reading, Krishnan said.

The Next-Generation Cognitive Viewer offered by CogniVision is a progressive, three-panel, image-centric viewer with a patented display methodology. It significantly speeds up information search within documents, Krishnan explained.

According to Seuss, we are approaching the era when users will no longer search for information, they will expect the machine to find what they need on its own and they will expect the machine to summarize for them what they need to know.

Northern Light uses latent semantic indexing to model user interests and find recommendations, Seuss said. For each user the platform creates such a model of the documents they have downloaded and use it to look for other documents being added to the research collection that contain those topics with similar weightings.

In the actual implementation the model considers not just singular words but groups of words with synonyms and related terms that represent topics. The whole process of topic creation is unsupervised. The machine figures it out, according to Seuss.

The Northern Light platform works for:

• All textual document formats (Word, PowerPoint, PDF, HTML, XML)
• Primary market research
• Syndicated market research
• Competitive intelligence
• Business and technology news
• Technical journal articles
• Conference presentations
• Still working on social media (Tweets are a dialect that don’t follow the patterns of the English language!)

An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.