Arria NLG

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.

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. 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. The NLG Engine consists of two components:

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.

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. 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.

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 and Shell US being among its main clients. More recently, Arria NLG has signed a contract with FarmLink to produce narrative reports to optimise agricultural yield potential, as well as a proof-of-concept agreement to provide data intelligence to aircraft engine maintenance staff. The group is also developing applications providing automatic analysis and reporting capabilities for fraud detection, risk mitigation and compliance to the banking industry.

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.