Information Today
                   Volume 16, Number 6 • June 1999		 Inxight Finds ‘Things’ in Text with Thing Finder

Inxight Software, Inc., a Xerox New Enterprise Company, has announced Thing Finder, its newest natural language processing product. According to the company, Thing Finder, a server-side component technology, greatly enhances search, categorization, and personalization by automatically identifying and tagging as meta-content “things” such as people, companies, products, addresses, dates, phone numbers, and monetary expressions found in documents. It can be used for online publishing, consumer and intranet portals, and knowledge management solutions to generate significantly improved search results and enhance online information directories and taxonomies for end users.

Traditional search and text mining tools require users to anticipate exact word combinations found in documents. Thus, users are required to know something about the information before they search it. According to the company, Thing Finder changes this paradigm by allowing users to browse or search by category of things, rather than having to know in advance the content of the document.

“We all have developed little tricks to overcome the inadequacies of Boolean or even natural language search query techniques,” said Steve Bernstein, Inxight’s director of marketing. “For instance, try finding a list of products and their respective manufacturers within a particular industry—a tough and time-consuming challenge using existing technologies. By automatically identifying a word or phrase as a product name, a company name, or dozens of other ‘things,’ Thing Finder enables those types of searches directly.”

As a software component, Thing Finder can be integrated into virtually any application that handles textual information. Thing Finder can also be customized to incorporate industry-specific vocabularies. For example, it could be adapted to identify case references in legal documents or medical terms in a health-care environment. Also, a dictionary of chemical elements and compositions could be incorporated into Thing Finder for use in petrochemical research.

Inxight’s Thing Finder is the latest addition to its LinguistX suite of natural language processing products designed to tap into the information stored in documents. Other LinguistX components include state-of-the-art software for automatic, multilingual information extraction and document summarization. LinguistX products can be found in a broad spectrum of applications ranging from full-text search engines to online content publishing tools. Inxight customers include Verity, Infoseek, Excite, and AltaVista.

Source: Inxight Software, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, 650/813-7350; http://www.inxight.com.

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