Data2Text

Impact

Description of impact

Data-to-text utilises Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology that allows computer systems to generate narrative summaries of complex data sets. These can be used by experts, professional and managers to better, and quickly, understand the information contained within large and complex data sets. The technology has been developed since 2000 by Prof Reiter and Dr Sripada at the University of Aberdeen, supported by several EPSRC grants. The Impact from the research has two dimensions. As economic impact, a spinout company, Data2Text (www.data2text.com), was created in late 2009 to commercialise the research. As of May 2013, Data2Text had 14 employees. Much of Data2Text's work is collaborative with another UK company, Arria NLG (www.arria.com), which as of May 2013 had about 25 employees, most of whom were involved in collaborative projects with Data2Text. As impact on practitioners and professional services, case studies have been developed in the oil & gas sector, in weather forecasting, and in healthcare, where NLG provides tools to rapidly develop narrative reports to facilitate planning and decision making, introducing benefits in terms of improved access to information and resultant cost and/or time savings. In addition the research led to the creation of simplenlg (http://simplenlg.googlecode.com/), an open-source software package which performs some basic natural language generation tasks. The simplenlg package is used by several companies, including Agfa, Nuance and Siemens as well as Data2Text and Arria NLG.
Impact statusImpact Completed (Open)