Natural Language Processing Startups and Influencers to Know

Last time, we look at how Natural Language Processing is used. This time, let's look at some NLP startups and influencers that you should know!

Social media listening has become an important tool for e-retailers who want to understand consumer shopping habits, predict product demand, or monitor trends to create sticky marketing messages. Consider the analysis of Black Friday. People talk a great deal about being hungover on Black Friday. Pharmaceutical brands like Advil, Tylenol, etc. could leverage this trend, mentioning “hangover remedies” in their real-time marketing campaigns on that day to increase sales.

NLP gives tremendous opportunities to bridge offline and online worlds. 

Natural Language Processing Startups to Know

Let’s look at some Natural Language Processing startups that you may be interested in following.

Klevu

Klevu is an instant site search solution for e-commerce stores (in fact, most advanced self-learning site search technology is used for online stores). It is a Finnish tech startup helping online retailers turn visitors into customers. Klevu search focuses on lightning fast, relevant search with actionable insights into shoppers’ search and easy self-service integration. Klevu's Enterprise Edition provides natural language search with ease of catalog maintenance and deep insights into shopping experiences.

EnglishCentral

EnglishCentral makes improving English language skills fun and effective by turning popular web videos into powerful language learning experiences. EnglishCentral students choose from thousands of engaging videos, learn words through their interval-based learning system, and then speak and get instant feedback using their proprietary speech assessment technology. 

Yummly

Yummly is building a smart, personal, and seamless platform for taste to answer the question, what will we eat tonight? They understand, analyze, mine, and connect food to data deliver smart, personal, and useful products that delight users. 

Vurb

Vurb’s mission is to create a smarter, more connected digital world that empowers people globally to do more of what they want all in one place. Voted “best new app” by Apple and TIME, Vurb is the only search app that gives you suggestions and results tailored to what you love and that keeps you updated on trending topics you care about. It’s the best way to search, save, and get things done in one simple app.

Insight Engines

Insight Engines builds intelligent search assistants that understand NLP to bridge data in your organization. This enables everyone to make complex correlations, gain new insights, and get the timely answers needed to solve critical business issues. 

MindMeld

MindMeld is a technology platform that enables companies to build intelligent conversational interfaces for any application or device. The world’s most innovative companies use their platform to power next-generation voice and chat assistants that enable users to quickly find and navigate information in a range of applications. MindMeld has been widely recognized as a leader in the field of natural language computing.

Desti

Desti is a radically new way to search and plan travel on a mobile device. They are working with game-changing technology that leverages natural language search technology and Artificial Intelligence to let users find precisely what they are looking for based on multiple criteria, not just price or travel dates. Their mission is to make travel planning as fun and painless as possible. 

MarketMuse

MarketMuse is an AI-assisted platform that helps digital marketers build better content plans and more effective content strategies. Through semantic machine learning on large-scale web content, they evaluate topic relevance and identify low-quality content on your site, identifying topic gaps and improving content performance.

Idibon

Idibon helps companies understand their language data. Using cutting-edge natural language processing and data science, Idibon takes unstructured data like emails, instant messages and social media, and provides structured answers to key business intelligence questions.

Kngine

Kngine is a knowledge engine designed to give you direct answers to your questions. Kngine is built upon the belief that there are people with questions and that there is enough information on the web to answer them. It is especially useful for mobile users. The engine is the world's first multi-language question answering engine, with support in English, German, Spanish, and Arabic.

Agolo

Agolo summarizes information faster and with broader coverage than any human. Agolo helps analysts act strategically instead of processing information. 

AddStructure

AddStructure offers a white-labeled natural language understanding platform for retailers and brands. It helps retailers implement natural language search on their own platform, and is compatible with multiple retail channels, including organic, on-site, mobile, voice and chatbot. 

NetBase

NetBase analyzes social media posts in real time using NLP to derive insights for brands and retailers for making business decisions. The company extracts information from posts on social media to understand customer perceptions or needs and to help businesses monitor their brands’ reputation.

Inbenta

Inbenta provides a comprehensive automated customer service solution powered by AI, NLP, and Machine Learning technologies. It helps companies improve online relationships with their customers through intelligent search, chatbots, and an e-commerce search appliance.

Natural Language Processing Influencers to Know

Let’s look at a couple of Natural Language Processing influencers that you may be interested in following.

Daniel Bobrow

Daniel Bobrow is a research fellow in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of the Palo Alto Research Center known for creating an Artificial Intelligence program called STUDENT. Bobrow was the President of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), chair of the Cognitive Science Society, and editor-in-chief of the journal Artificial Intelligence.

Rollo Carpenter

Rollo Carpenter is a creator of Jabberwacky and Cleverbot. His AI entries George and Joan were #1 for the Loebner Prize in 2005 and in 2006. In 2010, Carpenter won the British Computer Society’s Machine Intelligence Competition.

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as “the father of modern linguistics,” Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. Also, he is an author of the seminal work Syntactic Structures, which revolutionized linguistics with universal grammar.

Kenneth Colby

Kenneth Colby was an American psychiatrist dedicated to the theory and application of computer science and Artificial Intelligence in psychiatry. Colby was a pioneer in the development of computer technology as a tool to try to understand cognitive functions and to assist both patients and doctors in the treatment process.

David Ferrucci

David Ferrucci is a principal investigator of the team that created Watson. He led a team of IBM and academic researchers and engineers to the development of the Watson computer system that won a television quiz. He is also the founder, CEO, and chief scientist of Elemental Cognition, a venture based on NLP and AI that understands the world the way people do.

Daniel Jurafsky

Daniel Jurafsky is a Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University. With James H. Martin, he wrote the textbook Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, and Computational Linguistics.

Roger Schank

Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. He introduced the conceptual dependency theory for natural language understanding.

Alan Turing

Alan Turing is an originator of the Turing Test. He was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and Artificial Intelligence.

Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum is the author of the ELIZA chatbot. He was a German-American computer scientist and a professor emeritus at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. He is considered one of the fathers of modern Artificial Intelligence.

Terry Winograd

Terry Winograd is a professor of computer science at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and Artificial Intelligence fields for his work on natural language using the SHRDLU program.

William Aaron Woods

William Aaron Woods is a researcher in Natural Language Processing, continuous speech understanding, knowledge representation, and knowledge-based search technology. He is currently interested in using technology to help people organize and use information in organizations.

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram is a CEO and founder of Wolfram Research, creator of the programming language of natural language understanding, Wolfram Language, and the natural language processing computation engine Wolfram Alpha.

Victor Yngve

Victor Yngve was a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and NLP, as well as the use of computers to analyze and process languages. He created the first program to produce random and well-formed output sentences given a text.