| Our Services | Resources | News | About us | Search | Contact

Meaning wins 'best new thinking' award

11 December 2007

A paper co-authored by Tim Macer of meaning, Mark Pearson of Creation Insight (and formerly of Egg), and Fabrizio Sebastiani of the Italian National Council for Research in Pisa, and presented at Research 2007 in March, was announced as an award winner in the category 'Best New Thinking' at the 2007 Research Excellence and Effectiveness Awards ceremony at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, London, on the 10th December 2007.

The paper documents the trio's successful application of human language processing technology to the task of analysing and interpreting open-ended comments written by survey respondents when completing online questionnaires.

The Resarch 2007 Conference Award for Best New Thinking

The VCS (verbatim coding system) was devloped for online bank Egg and is based on the technology pioneered by Dr Sebastiani at the Italian National Council for Research in Pisa. Tim Macer, from meaning, was engaged by Egg to facilitate and manage the project, and work on the design with developers from ISTI-CNR. The award judges stated: "This paper is an important demonstration of ‘machine learning’ and represents a quantum leap in the coding of open-ended data. It holds out the promise of major cost savings on conventional surveys and has implications for analysis of customer communications in the Web 2.0 era. It featured a client who was prepared to take a risk and search outside conventional areas for the solution to his problem, an academic who found him the potential answer, and an expert who ‘delivered the goods’"

Tim Macer said: "This project has been a perfect example of the benefits of working in partnership. There is a fourth partner, not named on the award, but involved in this from the start, with whom we share this proud moment - Archimede Infomatica, in Pisa, who developed the software under ISTI-CNR's guideance. We knew this had the potential to be good, but just how good the technology proved to be has taken us all by surprise. We hope it wil leave a lasting legacy for the research industry, now that research software providers are starting to licence the ISTI-CNR technology to interface with their own software platforms."