It was a long, exciting and super interesting year 2017 for LangTec. We keep on growing … slowly, but very steadily. Our projects continually  increase in volume, scope and complexity. For this reason, both our revenue and team size have doubled in the past year. Well, if this isn’t a really good reason to party … !

We are extending a very warm welcome to Carina Rawein as a new team member here at LangTec. Carina is an experienced computational linguist with applied experience in the areas of corpus linguistics and deep learning in the context of distributional lexical properties. We are delighted to have Carina on bord with us 🙂

Objective of the newly formed ZIM Network Morpheus is to fund small and medium businesses (SMB) in their coorperation with large enterprises and public research institutions in innovative projects. The network focuses on the application of speech, text and data analytics in medicine, medical technology and life sciences. The consortium comprises a total of 23 companies: German SMBs, public research institutions such as the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Technology as well as the two pharmaceutical corporations AbbVie and Boehringer Ingelheim.

We are happy to report yet another project win to apply our extensive expertise in the semantic analysis of e-commerce product data. Our client, operator of one of the largest product comparison platforms on the German market, has commissioned us with the refinement of their analytics algorithms for product data, placing particular emphasis on their application in non-European target markets.

After an extensive pre-screening process LangTec has been commissioned to contribute to a large-scale development effort with one of the leading communication infrastructure providers in Germany. The objective of the developement effort scoped over several years is to automate internal data flows and to implement complex content analytics on the collected data.

With our office located only 150 m from the G20 summit venue, LangTec felt it is high time to contribute our view on things as well. This is what our office window now looks like from outside:

Our expert team for knowledge representation received the commission for the modelling and validation of a graph-based fact knowledge base. In the coming weeks and months, we will be supporting a large internationally active content provider in transferring their knowledge base into a linked-data model.

We are happy that our working student Jula Menck is joining us again at LangTec after her five-month research break. Jula will continue to support our development team. Her main focus over the forthcoming weeks and months will be to contribute to our product development team working on our automated text-generation solution (NLG). During her break, Julia was involved in research on automated procedures for prosody extraction from speech data.

We are very pleased about receiving the commission for the architectural upgrade of a sentiment analysis for facebook posts already in productive use. This new engagement will unfold in the context of  our long-standing client relation with facelift. Thank you, facelift!

In a refined atmosphere, we celebrated LangTec’s 6th birthday with our core team on March 15h, 2017. After a tough skittles match, we enjoyed a splendid 3-course-meal. The good news: Nobody went home hungry that night. The bad news: Even computational linguists can have sore muscles the next day.