Data2Text

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Company

Data2Text is a spin-out company from the University of Aberdeen, based on technology developed by the university's Data-to-Text research group. 
 

Key staff are
  • Ian Davy.  
    • Ian has 30 years of experience as a meteorologist, including serving as managing director of an Aberdeen meteorology company.  He has worked with many of the major North Sea oil companies.
  • Ehud Reiter. 
    • Ehud is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen, where he leads the data-to-text research group.  Ehud has worked on natural language generation and data-to-text since obtaining his PhD from Harvard in 1990, and is recognised as one of the leading academic experts in these fields.
  • Yaji Sripada.  
    • Yaji is a Senior Lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen and has worked on data-to-text technology for the past 10 years. Yaji specialised in data analysis, interpretation and summarisation.

History

Data2Text originated in the SumTime research project at Aberdeen University, when Ehud Reiter, Yaji Sripada, and Ian Davy worked together to develop a data-to-text system which could generate very high quality weather forecast texts from numerical weather prediction data.  The SumTime project was very successful, and indeed evaluations showed that users sometimes preferred SumTime texts to forecast texts written by professional forecasters.

After SumTime ended, Ehud and Yaji continued to work on academic data-to-text projects in many different areas, including producing more complex weather forecast texts, summarising medical clinical data, explaining results of educational assessments, presenting information to blind people, and helping non-speaking children communicate better.  In 2009 they got together again with Ian (who had been running a meteorological services company in Aberdeen), and decided that it was time to get data-to-text technology out of the lab and into everyday usage; hence Data2Text.

Data2Text has been profitable since it was founded in 2009. In addition to developing client-specific solutions, the company was awarded a SMART award in 2010 from Scottish Enterprise to help it develop its core technology.