What makes our technology so unique, and what is its potential?

Artificial Intelligence is radically changing our world. However, the applications of AI for language and language understanding remain scarce and mostly limited to statistical methods based on machine learning. Nalantis wants to change this and has developed a hybrid AI that can do much more. 

"The way we want to understand language - and 'understanding' is a very important verb here - is by semantic decomposition," says our CEO Frank Aernout. "We don’t just recognise a word, but also understand it in its semantic context. A bit like comprehensive reading in school: that is kind of what we do. We want to understand the meaning of data so that we can use it for different applications."

To do that, we developed a hybrid form of AI: a combination of machine learning techniques with unique concept nets. This allows us to take into account the meaning of words, terms, expressions and especially the connections between them.

"When reading a text, our technology understands what those connections are," Aernout says. "And that is a very big difference with machine learning, which needs millions of data and an endless amount of algorithms to be able to only try to see certain patterns." 

Whether those machine learning patterns are correct and true is another question. It becomes difficult, for example, with homonyms, words with multiple meanings such as ‘bark’, ‘address’ and ‘fair’. But also more complex cases, such as ambiguous sentence structures and the underlying emotion of a statement, are difficult for ordinary machine learning to analyse. Whereas Nalantis' technology can take one document, analyse it and will know perfectly what it says without having to train the AI beforehand. "That gains you time, costs and quality.”

This augmented intelligence has a lot of potential application areas. Nalantis is currently focusing on a few specific segments: talent management, city councils, legal and urban air mobility. But the need for our solutions also rises in the medical sector, the financial world, e-learning ... So there is definitely enough potential and there is so much yet to be unravelled from our story!