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Show HN: TextRazor, a scriptable text mining API

textrazor.com

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Re: Show HN: TextRazor, a scriptable text mining API

#11

Post by tcwc »

steeve wrote: post #2

Cool demo, but how do you guys compare to, say, Alchemy API ? Also, no pricing => not cool.

Hey steeve we thought there were a few things missing in the competition. We've built a bunch of extra functionality such as more extensive relation and dependency parsing and contextual entailment generation, and use all that to build much more accurate entity and topic recognition, an area we think the others can be greatly improved on.

We also expose all these results to a Prolog interpreter on our backend and allow you to add custom logic to mashup and extend all of our results, as well as provide a much easier integration experience.

Totally agree with you on the pricing front, we're still finalising the details there. We're aiming to be fully transparent with both the technical and business side of things.

Re: Show HN: TextRazor, a scriptable text mining API

#12

Post by tcwc »

anilshanbhag wrote: post #7

This is just like stanford parser. http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/ Why use TextRazor and pay for it ?

The Stanford parser is great, but isn't really the same. The Stanford entity recogniser is limited to the standard types of people, places, companies, but we identify and disambiguate into a far richer ontology from wikipedia, and can recognize topic abstractions that aren't explicitly mentioned.

Also we found the Stanford tools (and the other open source NLP tools) were difficult to integrate into "production" apps for various reasons. One big one was performance - we aim to run the full parsing and extraction pipeline on an average news story in a few hundred milliseconds, which can be an order of magnitude faster than the others.

Re: Show HN: TextRazor, a scriptable text mining API

#13

Post by ses »

Being a big Prolog fan, I think this looks like an awesome product. This sort of textual analysis will become more important as time goes on. As the interest in search technologies grows, I think intelligent search (contextual queries, query answering, clustering, recommendations, meta-data extraction etc.) will start to appear in more end-user products. One question... whereabouts in the UK are you based?

Re: Show HN: TextRazor, a scriptable text mining API

#15

Post by JPKab »

tcwc wrote: post #12
anilshanbhag wrote: post #7

This is just like stanford parser. http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/ Why use TextRazor and pay for it ?

The Stanford parser is great, but isn't really the same. The Stanford entity recogniser is limited to the standard types of people, places, companies, but we identify and disambiguate into a far richer ontology from wikipedia, and can recognize topic abstractions that aren't explicitly mentioned. Also we found the Stanford tools (and the other open source NLP tools) were difficult to integrate into "production" apps…

How does your offering compare to Calais from Thomson-Reuters?

Edit: To be specific, it looks very similar. What do you have that Calais doesn't?

Re: Show HN: TextRazor, a scriptable text mining API

#17

Post by ismaelc »

tcwc wrote: post #11
steeve wrote: post #2

Cool demo, but how do you guys compare to, say, Alchemy API ? Also, no pricing => not cool.

Hey steeve we thought there were a few things missing in the competition. We've built a bunch of extra functionality such as more extensive relation and dependency parsing and contextual entailment generation, and use all that to build much more accurate entity and topic recognition, an area we think the others can be greatly improved on. We also expose all these results to a Prolog interpreter on our backend and all…

You can add billing/pricing tiers to your API now using Mashape http://www.mashape.com/ (Disclaimer: I work for Mashape. Let me know if you need help!)

Re: Show HN: TextRazor, a scriptable text mining API

#18

Post by mark_l_watson »

gsharma wrote: post #14
anilshanbhag wrote: post #7

This is just like stanford parser. http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/ Why use TextRazor and pay for it ?

Just tried http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/ it only allows up to 70 characters for parsing.

Try downloading the distribution of code and data and run it locally. Java stuff, maven based, easy to run. Use the example code listed on the installation web page to see how to set it up.

Re: Show HN: TextRazor, a scriptable text mining API

#20

Post by tcwc »

ses wrote: post #13

Being a big Prolog fan, I think this looks like an awesome product. This sort of textual analysis will become more important as time goes on. As the interest in search technologies grows, I think intelligent search (contextual queries, query answering, clustering, recommendations, meta-data extraction etc.) will start to appear in more end-user products. One question... whereabouts in the UK are you based?

Thanks, great to see the other Prolog fans coming out of the woodwork! Based in London.
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