Bringing ‘common sense’ to text analytics
Bringing “common sense” to artificial intelligence is one of the biggest challenges in computer science: It entails equipping computers with the shared knowledge that humans use to infer meaning, make connections and communicate, among other things. Catherine Havasi ’03, MEng ’04 dedicated more than a decade to such research, amassing an enormous knowledge base from around the Web. In 2010, she used that research as the technological foundation for Luminoso Technologies, a startup whose commercial software is helping bring common sense to text analytics. Luminoso’s technology aims to quickly mine and analyze vast quantities of online text and — using a database of world knowledge — quickly identify opinions, patterns and underlying themes in the text. “It has this ‘backbone’ of common sense that allows our technology to spontaneously infer meaning” from text, Havasi says. In a few short years, Luminoso has earned big-name clients, including Mars, BP and Scotts....