Arria NLG

Arria NLG plc is a UK-based company offering Artificial Intelligence technology in data analytics and information delivery.[1] It is one of the pioneering companies in the space of automatic text generation,[2] and when it floated on London's Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in December 2013, it was valued at over £160 million.[3] However, Arria was later delisted from the stock exchanged as the company moved from the UK to Australia.[4] Arria's technology is based on three decades of scientific research in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG).[5]

Arria NLG plc
TypePublic
AIM: NLG
IndustryTechnology
Software
Founded2009 (2009)
Founder
  • Ehud Reiter
  • Yaji Sripada
  • Ian Davy
  • John Perry
  • Ross Turner
Headquarters
London
,
UK
ProductsArria NLG Engine: software and applications
Websitearria.com

History

The company was founded in 2009 under the name Data2Text Limited by Professor Ehud Reiter, Senior Lecturer Dr Yaji Sripada, and post-doctoral researcher Dr Ross Turner from the NLG research group at the University of Aberdeen, and meteorologist/entrepreneur Ian Davy. In May 2012, Data2Text joined forces with a specialist software development and marketing firm, Arria NLG (then a limited company), which took a 20% stake in Data2Text. In late 2013, Arria NLG acquired the remaining 80% of Data2Text, and in December 2013 Arria NLG converted to a public listed company and was floated on the AIM.[6][3]

Technology/Science

"The fundamental goal of the technology is to take large quantities of data, identify the key information contained in that data, and express that information in natural language text or voice," says Dr Robert Dale, the company's Chief Technology Officer.[5] To reach this goal, the Arria NLG Engine, a cloud-based enterprise software platform, automatically recognises patterns in large volumes of complex data, which are then distilled into a narrative description of the most significant information.[7] The NLG Engine consists of two components:

  • The analysis and interpretation component takes raw transactional or sensor data and turns it into information using rules based on the knowledge of a domain expert.
  • The NLG component communicates this information in natural language, based on general linguistic rules augmented with industry-specific terminology and usage.[5]

Arria NLG's capabilities are rooted in the scientific research conducted since the 1980s by its founder and Chief Scientist, Professor Ehud Reiter, and Chief Technology Officer Dr Robert Dale.[5]

In June 2014, Arria NLG's technology was awarded US patents 8,762,133 and 8,762,134.

Among Arria's founders are Professor Ehud Reiter and Dr Yaji Sripada, both currently teaching and researching in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen. Reiter, Arria's Chief Scientist, holds a PhD from Harvard and founded the NLG research group in Aberdeen, one of the world's most renowned research groups on Natural language generation. Dr Robert Dale joined Arria as Chief Strategy Scientist and CTO after 17 years as professor in the Department of Computing at Macquarie University, where he was director of the now defunct Microsoft Research Institute and later the Centre for Language Technology.[7] From 2003 to 2014, Dale was editor in chief of Computational Linguistics, the leading journal in the field of Natural Language Processing. In 2000, Reiter and Dale co-authored the seminal textbook Building Natural Language Generation Systems.[8]

Applications

Data2Text Limited originally focussed on automatically producing meteorological reports based on numerical weather forecast data, but quickly extended its offerings to the conversion of vast amounts of data from oil and gas platforms into natural language reports for engineers and operators, with the UK's Met Office[9] and Shell US being among its main clients.[10] More recently, Arria NLG has signed a contract with FarmLink to produce narrative reports to optimise agricultural yield potential,[11] as well as a proof-of-concept agreement to provide data intelligence to aircraft engine maintenance staff.[12] The group is also developing applications providing automatic analysis and reporting capabilities for fraud detection, risk mitigation and compliance to the banking industry.[6][13]

Competitors

Other companies who operate in the NLG space include Automated Insights, a firm based in Durham, North Carolina, Chicago-based Narrative Science, and Yseop, Inc, a European firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas, as well as Linguastat from San Francisco, California,[2] United Robots from Sweden and Retresco, based in Berlin, Germany, Textmercato, from Bangalore, India.

See also

References
  1. Greig Cameron (15 November 2013). "£20m windfall to boost university spin-out company". The Herald Scotland. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
  2. Dan Woods (28 August 2014). "Why you should hire a robot to write for you". Forbes. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
  3. Greig Cameron (6 December 2013). "Arria makes AIM debut". The Herald Scotland. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
  4. "Arria Shares Plunge As Company Seeks Funds Ahead Of AIM Cancellation (ALLISS)". MorningstarUK. Retrieved 10 July 2018.
  5. Elaine Maslin (2 October 2014). "Narrating Data". Offshore Engineer. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
  6. Erika Askeland (13 August 2014). "Arria to cash in on bank project" (PDF). The Press and Journal, reproduced by Oil & Gas Academy of Scotland. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
  7. "Can text summaries of data help people make better decisions than visualisations". Digital Energy Journal. 29 October 2014. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
  8. Dale, Robert; Reiter, Ehud. 2000. Building Natural Language Generation Systems. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052102451X.
  9. "Arria NLG plc and the Met Office". Met Office, UK. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
  10. Greig Cameron (12 June 2014). "Arria is aiming to stay strong with client help". The Herald Scotland. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
  11. Alice Attwood (13 October 2014). "Arria NLG Signs Framework Development Contract With FarmLink". Alliance News. Retrieved 6 January 2015.
  12. Greig Cameron (14 October 2014). "Arria looking to work with aviation industry". The Herald Scotland. Retrieved 6 January 2015.
  13. Greig Cameron (12 August 2014). "Arria secures its first financial services deal". The Herald Scotland. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
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