Innovation: Reading in Context

The database company, Oracle, has come up with a software package called Context. This can analyse and understand unstructured text, such as newspapers and legal documents, allowing documents to be summarised without human intervention. Existing tools for creating summaries on computer databases rely on statistical methods which assess what is most important by counting the frequency of words or phrases. Context has a 600,000-word dictionary, with up to 1,000 pieces of linguistic data on each word. This gives it the ability to understand the English language intelligently.