Northern Light CEO David Seuss Authors Article About Next-Generation Search Engines in April 2011 Edition of Proceedings of the IEEE

"In-Depth Understanding: Teaching Search Engines to Interpret Meaning" describes use of meaning extraction technology in strategic research portals

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Northern Light

Mar 24, 2011, 09:00 ET

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Northern Light (www.northernlight.com) CEO C. David Seuss has taken his vision of "meaning extraction" – an advanced application of text analytics technology that he believes is "the future of search" – to the pages of one of the most prestigious technology journals, Proceedings of the IEEE. The IEEE is the world's oldest and largest professional society, with 410,000 members in over 170 countries.

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In an article entitled, "In-Depth Understanding: Teaching Search Engines to Interpret Meaning," which appears as the Point of View article in the magazine's April 2011 edition published this week, Seuss laments that mainstream search engines are largely unchanged over the past 17 years. The cure, he proposes, is "meaning extraction", an emerging technology that identifies concepts contained within documents and document repositories, and surfaces combinations of these concepts that imply meaning in the context of the business, professional, or technical purpose of the search process.

In the article, Seuss writes, "Search engines must evolve to have an in-depth understanding of the searched material and the associated ways of knowing in the user's domain of knowledge. It is necessary that search engines grasp the professional purpose for a given search and that search goes beyond presenting document lists to users. Search engines must interpret and analyze the search results and then present findings that would be considered most significant by the users if they were able to read all of the documents retrieved in the search process."

For members of the IEEE, the article can be accessed directly from IEEE at: http://www.ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=5733920

Northern Light has posted a downloadable copy of the article on its home page at www.northernlight.com.

Today, meaning extraction is beginning to be applied by companies to search electronic document repositories and various online resources to dramatically improve and accelerate a researcher's ability to gain insight into a topic and answer specific research questions, according to Seuss. The technology is incorporated into Northern Light's SinglePoint™ strategic research portal, the only turnkey enterprise search application that provides centralized search, analysis, and access for diverse sources of internal, external, and licensed market intelligence. SinglePoint portals are used by many of the world's leading research-driven companies in IT, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, financial services and other industries for competitive intelligence and market research, strategic planning, product development, marketing, and sales.

Seuss's article is based on a presentation he gave at the IEEE Workshop on the Future of Information in Washington, D.C. last May, where he was part of a group of IT industry thought leaders that offered perspectives on how information will be captured, processed and consumed 10 years from now. The three-day conference featured presentations by industry notables, including Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google and often called "the father of the internet"; Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Daniel E. Atkins, professor of information and EECS at the University of Michigan; as well as research executives from Microsoft Corp. and IBM. The conference was organized by a team under the direction of Anthony Durniak of IEEE and William B. Rouse, executive director of the Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Seuss has spent much of his career in the IT industry. Prior to joining Northern Light as its founding CEO in 1996, Seuss founded Spinnaker Software, which he led from inception to a publicly-traded company listed on NASDAQ. Before Spinnaker, Seuss was a manager and consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. He holds a MBA from the Harvard Business School and a bachelor of industrial engineering from Georgia Tech, and is a member of the board of advisors of the Tennenbaum Institute of Georgia Tech.

About Northern Light

Northern Light has been providing strategic research portals, business research content, and search technology to global enterprises since 1996. Northern Light's current clients include Fortune 100 market leaders in information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, energy, financial services and insurance, transportation, retailing, and electronics. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a development center in St. Petersburg, Russia, Northern Light Group LLC is a profitable, privately-held, self-funded company with more than 50 employees.

SOURCE Northern Light