All posts by Mark Vreijling

September 19, 2018

Semlab introduction video

We have recently added a new introduction video to our website. Check it out and if oyu have any questions, please let us know.


SemLab is an Artificial Intelligence Software company. We make decision support applications, of which the software is based on language technology, for especially Fintech, Legaltech and Healthcare.

 

February 9, 2017

JuriBot – The Dutch Legal AI Predicting Criminal Trial Outcomes

Artificial Lawyer recently caught up with Bram Stalknecht, CEO of Dutch AI developer SemLab and founder of JuriBot, a legal AI litigation analysis application capable of criminal trial outcome prediction.

Stalknecht begins by explaining that JuriBot has been built by SemLab, a Dutch company that says of itself: ‘[We are] Europe’s main developers of semantic software applications. Today we have one of the largest groups of experts in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence technologies.’

SemLab has around 45 full time staff working on AI. The company operates in several areas and has developed legal applications before, such as CrimiKaart, which allows people to track crimes committed in Holland at a very detailed level.

more

 

July 3, 2013

Ranking Luxury cars brands based on sentiment

SemLab’s semantic text processing platform enables the real-time monitoring of product and brand associated sentiments. In our showcase application AutoSentiment we continuously monitor the top ten most popular online automotive blog websites in The Netherlands and capture the sentiments expressed in the edited articles as well as in the readers’ comments.

In contrast to traditional sentiment tools, we determine the semantics of the expressed opinions by comparing the text to an automotive ontology of over 300 events. These events describe the most common concepts expressed in these types of text. For example the events range from “I like the car” to “the engine noise is barely audible”. Furthermore, the events are classified in the seven main quality parameters for luxury cars: Price, Looks, Driving experience, Comfort, Fuel consumption, Quality and Safety.

A live version of the AutoSentiment monitoring system is available here.

Results

The system is currently online and has processed about 145.000 text items resulting in 141.396 useful events. Excluding all car brands that yield 50 events or less, results in data on the 37 most popular car brands currently available in The Netherlands.

Ranking this data according to the defined parameters results in the following graphs:

Luxury car brands ranked on price sentiment

 

The graph above lists the car brands according to the percentage of positive sentiment about its purchasing cost. On the left hand side the brands are perceived as (too) expensive, the cars on the right are deemed affordable or to offer good value for money.

The overall results are not surprising: The top five expensive car brands include Ferrari, Land Rover and Cadillac, whereas the affordable brands are Skoda, Suzuki and Mitsubishi. More interesting is the position of Dacia and Renault. Renault is perceived as significantly more affordable than its low cost sister brand Dacia, which this data puts in the same range as the acclaimed luxury brand Lexus.

Luxury car brands ranked on driving experience sentiment

 

Regarding the driving experience, the top three consists of Porsche, Jaguar and Ferrari. The worst driving experience is expected from Chevrolet (In The Netherlands mostly marketing the former Daewoo models) and Dacia.

Luxury car brands ranked on appearance sentiment

 

The aesthetics associated with the car brands result in the graph above. The bottom section is the domain of most of the Japanese brands (with the exception of Suzuki and Mazda) and, more surprisingly Volkswagen. The top section is populated by the Italian design of Alfa Romeo and Lancia, but also Tesla whose limited model range has an almost unanimous appeal.
Value for money

Another way of examining this data is to plot one factor against the other. For instance when using price on the horizontal axis and the looks on the vertical axis results in the graph below.

Luxury car brands ranked on looks versus price sentiment

 

This graph clearly illustrates that for affordable good looking cast the Italian brands are in a league of their own. Fiat seems to be a bit out of contact with the other Italian brands, but still scores higher than most traditionally German brands.

The French brands are mostly associated with reasonably affordable and generally comfortable cars. This expectation can also be checked using our data since comfort was one of the main parameters included. The graph below plots the perceived comfort versus the price level of that brand.

Luxury car brands ranked on comfort versus price sentiment

 

The graph above illustrates that the Italian brands are perceived to offer less comfortable cars that the traditionally French brands. German brands score similarly but are generally in a higher price range. Surprisingly, Volkswagen scores higher than the luxury brands Mercedes and BMW. This may well result from the definition of Comfort used in this test, which included ergonomics, personal space and general practicality.
Conclusion

The conclusion that we draw from these results is that the data appears to be in agreement with most stereotypical preconceptions about the car brands. This is a good thing since the system is aimed at capturing the opinion of the general public, which by its nature can be expected to be sensitive to stereotyping.

A logical improvement in this study is to examine the various car models instead of the generic brands. In fact, the required data is available so if anyone is interested in these results or any other aspect of real time product sentiment monitoring, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

 

April 15, 2013

New SemLab website

We have upgraded our website. The new site provides a more complete view of our offering and is easier to maintain. This should result in more up to date content, and hopefully more pageviews.

 

November 29, 2010

SemLab website redesigned

The SemLab website has been redesigned. The new website is more easy to navigate, with information that is concise and with updated graphics. The two flagship products, ViewerPro and Meditra now have their own dedicated sections, and there are separate pages dedicated to our research projects and careers.

Have a look at SemLab’s new website

 

August 24, 2010

Vacature: Java Developer

SemLab is een groeiend kennisintensief en innovatief softwarebedrijf met hoogopgeleide medewerkers.
SemLab heeft een internationale klantenkring, die bestaat uit de grootste financiële services organisaties in Europa. Ook klanten in Nederland worden bediend met beslissingsondersteunende applicaties waarbij het er om draait de beschikbare informatie juist te interpreteren en snel de juiste actie te ondernemen.
Of het nu gaat om patiëntenzorg of de handel in derivaten, SemLab’s nieuwste software applicaties ondersteunen de professional met de juiste informatie om snel tot het optimale resultaat te komen.

SemLab maakt nu een grote groei door en zoekt per direct een:

JAVA DEVELOPER

SemLab zoekt een enthousiaste software developer met ruime kennis van Java.

Heb je een HBO of academische opleiding in software ontwikkeling? Heb je ruime ervaring met ontwikkelen in Java en lijkt het je interessant om te werken aan taaltechnologiën of beslissingsondersteuning? Neem dan contact met ons op voor een uitdagende baan.

We bieden een interessante functie met doorgroeimogelijkheden, een marktconform salaris en leuke collega’s.

Reageren?

Mail naar info@semlab.nl of bel naar 0172 494 777 en vraag naar Dr. Mark Vreijling.

Acquisitie op deze functie wordt niet op prijs gesteld.

 

August 24, 2010

Vacature: Onderzoeker/Developer

SemLab is een groeiend kennisintensief en innovatief softwarebedrijf met hoogopgeleide medewerkers.
SemLab heeft een internationale klantenkring, die bestaat uit de grootste financiële services organisaties in Europa. Ook klanten in Nederland worden bediend met beslissingsondersteunende applicaties waarbij het er om draait de beschikbare informatie juist te interpreteren en snel de juiste actie te ondernemen.
Of het nu gaat om patiëntenzorg of de handel in derivaten, SemLab’s nieuwste software applicaties ondersteunen de professional met de juiste informatie om snel tot het optimale resultaat te komen.

SemLab maakt nu een grote groei door en zoekt per direct een:

ONDERZOEKER/DEVELOPER Kennistechnologie

SemLab zoekt een enthousiaste, zelfstandige onderzoeker / software developer kennistechnologie.

Heb je een academische opleiding afgerond (MA), vind je het leuk om zelfstandig aan projecten te werken en daarvoor de benodigde kennis te vergaren? Heb je ruime ervaring met ontwikkelen in Java en affiniteit met taaltechnologiën of beslissingsondersteuning? Neem dan contact met ons op voor een uitdagende baan.

Aangezien SemLab in beginsel een softwarebedrijf is, is het de bedoeling dat de ontwikkelde inzichten worden omgezet naar commerciële applicaties. Daarom is voor deze functie een uitmuntende kennis van (web) applicatie ontwikkeling in Java een absoluut vereiste.

Affiniteit met financiële services of  strekt tot aanbeveling

We bieden een interessante functie met doorgroeimogelijkheden, een marktconform salaris en leuke collega’s.

Reageren?

Mail naar info@semlab.nl of bel naar 0172 494 777 en vraag naar Dr. Mark Vreijling.

Acquisitie op deze functie wordt niet op prijs gesteld.

 

August 23, 2010

SOLIM project submits research paper

Part of the SOLIM project’s research results have been submitted as a research paper entitled “The use of OWL for Spatial Knowledge based Applications” in the Semantic Web journal.

The paper was written by representatives of SemLab, Tilde, Picsearch and AGMLab. In this paper it is demonstrated that the use of OWL and spatial reasoning tools – despite shortcomings – enables effective storage of, and reasoning with spatial information by use of a hybrid solution. The utility of this solution will be illustrated by its application in two diverse domains; automatic processing of textual information and querying of graphical information, in machine translation and image searching applications.

 

May 25, 2010

VACATURE: Java developer

SemLab is een groeiend kennisintensief en innovatief softwarebedrijf met hoogopgeleide medewerkers.
SemLab heeft een internationale klantenkring, die bestaat uit de grootste financiële services organisaties in Europa. Ook klanten in Nederland worden bediend met beslissingsondersteunende applicaties waarbij het er om draait de beschikbare informatie juist te interpreteren en snel de juiste actie te ondernemen.
Of het nu gaat om patiëntenzorg of de handel in derivaten, SemLab’s nieuwste software applicaties ondersteunen de professional met de juiste informatie om snel tot het optimale resultaat te komen.

SemLab maakt nu een grote groei door en zoekt per direct:

JAVA DEVELOPER


SemLab zoekt een enthousiaste, leergierige Java developer met 2-5 jaar ervaring bij een software bedrijf.

Ruime ervaring met Java (SCJP of vergelijkbaar) en Swing is vereist.

Affiniteit met taaltechnologie, beslissingsondersteuning en/of aantoonbare (SCJD) kennis van de volgende technologie strekt tot aanbeveling :

• Webservices
• J2EE
• Sesame (Open RDF)
• Maven
• parallel programming (multi threaded)

We bieden een interessante functie met doorgroeimogelijkheden, een marktconform salaris en leuke collega’s.

Reageren?

Mail naar info@semlab.nl of bel naar 0172 494 777 en vraag naar Dr. Mark Vreijling.

Acquisitie op deze functie wordt niet op prijs gesteld.

 

June 11, 2009

SemLab’s Semantic Search

The SemLab semantic search platform is based on our Vicore™ data processing platform which, among others, is the basis of our leading semantic news analysis solution ViewerPro™.

The purpose of semantic search is to improve standard keyword-based search technologies by adding domain dependent, a-priory knowledge about the semantics of the concepts entailed in the documents that are analysed. This a-priory knowledge is contained in ontologies: formal descriptions of the concepts that exist in the domain of application. In general the ontologies play a pivotal role in a semantic enabled technology and have a profound effect on its overall quality. For a search platform, the common quality parameters Precision and Recall will largely depend on the quality of the ontologies used.

Semlab’s semantic platform fully acknowledges that ontologies are the key to a successful semantic analysis system and therefore support ontology maintenance as a core technology. This includes both expert knowledge expression as well as (supervised) automatic ontology learning from domain-specific documents. In addition the SemLab platform fully supports existing base ontologies and offers their own default domain ontologies for many areas of financial information management, exactly as are used every day by the ViewerPro semantic news analysis platform.

The SemLab semantic platform is in essence a data pipelining platform in the sense that the data sources are fed to the start of the line, various relatively independent subsequent operations are done on the data. The results of these are stored in various databases.

illustration2

In the case of semantic search, the data sources consist of text documents (e.g. reports, news messages, e-mails) in various formats and the final result is an semantic index, modeling the occurrence of ontology terms in the documents. When a user presents the platform with search query, this query is treated as if it were another document and also expressed in terms of the ontology. Since both the document corpus and the user’s query are expressed within the same domain of discourse, they can be compared and ranked on similarity. Finally, using carefully designed threshold values, the resulting document sections are presented to the user in a GUI or available through an API to other applications. In addition to the retrieval of documents, the domain ontology can also be queried directly. In this way the semantic search platform also serves as a question answering tool, enabling users to quickly retrieve the corporate domain knowledge.