Interview with Dr Abderrafih Lehmam, Ph.D and CTO of MINING ESSENTIAL
Created in 2008, MINING ESSENTIAL is a French-based publisher of automatic text summarization technologies. MINING ESSENTIAL sells innovative products for workstations, corporate applications and online services that facilitate rapid access to essential text-based information through a summary designed to be as concise and precise as possible.
Dr Abderrafih Lehmam tells us about this exciting new collaboration:
How was Mining Essential born?
Back in 2007 Pierre-Francois Doucet and I had a meeting during which many ideas coalesced. I wanted to implement my experience from over 18 years of research in the field of computational linguistics and develop a new technology for text summarization and Pierre-Francois shared the vision and so we began our journey.
How would you describe your work and who is your target market?
Automatic summarization is the process of automatically transforming source text into a new shorter version, the relevant information being preserved. To be concise, its text compression!
This technology is a novel response to the “Big Data” challenge that businesses are faced with today. Our target market also includes governments, universities and individuals who, as informed consumers, use the Internet as a source of information and knowledge.
What would be concrete examples of what Essential Summarizer can do?
The main uses of Essential Summarizer are threefold:
1. One summary by text: this option is mainly used by individuals and small businesses to summarise individual texts.
2. Multiple summaries generated from multiples source texts: this option is used by divisions or groups sharing a corporate server to summarise information from various material.
3. Multiple texts(corpus texts) are processed to produce a single summary (synthesis) that combines the essential information of all those source texts.
Regarding the internet, conventional systems used for News websites are limited to viewing the beginning of the original article followed by “(…)” with a link to the web page used as a source.Alternatively, Essential Summarizer will display at first an automatic summary of each article from each page on the website, which gives the essential information of the source text. If the readers find this summary interesting, they can access the full-text article by clicking on a link.
How would the translation market benefit from a solution like the Essential Summarizer?
The turnover of the translation market reached over $ 30 billion in 2012.This includes all kinds of projects: translation of software, websites, brochures and documents (technical, financial, legal, commercial …). The cost of translation is huge because of the volume and the number of languages in which they are translated.
However, a significant number of these documents are working papers and their translation is necessary to be understood by staff who do not understand the language of the source document. The intermediate versions are translated at high cost whereas the translation of a pertinent summary would be sufficient and far more cost-effective.
We see automatic summarization and translation as natural partners which when combined have positive impact on a company’s budget: firstly, summarisation is time-saving since the reader will spend less time reading documents and secondly the costs of translation is reduced significantly.The return on investment is guaranteed.
What it is the strength of Essential Summarizer compared to similar tools?
The strength of the Essential Summarizer solution is its advanced linguistic and technological performance.The company have invested heavily in R&D in order to develop the best methods for automatic generation of“summary by extraction”.
Why this partnership between Mining Essential – Wordbee?
The Innovative combination of Essential Mining’s summarization and Wordbee Translator tackles large-scale translation projects in less time, at lower cost, while maintaining a level of quality that meets the clients’ requirements.
The fact that our business models are very similar also facilitated the establishment of a joint commercial offer for our respective clients.
What is the next step for Mining Essential?
We are currently working on Smartphone and digital tablet applications for Mining Essential that will integrate the major search engines, news channels (Google News, MSN News, etc.) and Twitter. This app will be on the market by the end of this month.
