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Arria NLG (LSE:NLG) is a spin off a University of Aberdeen incubated business initially called Data2Text. Arria acquired a 20% interest in Data2Text in May 2012. On 25 October this year – 40 days ago – Arria completed 100% ownership. This morning Arria NLG floated its shares on the AIM at 100.0 pence per share. By the middle of the day the IPO was looking quite successful as the Arria NLG share price had risen to 159.0.
There’s going to be a tendency to refer to the company simply as Arria, but it is the NLG part of the name that is important. It stands for “Natural Language Generation.” I thought that 3D printing would be hard to beat as the next big thing, but NLG may be the real contender. Whilst 3D printing has its own growing commercial niche, NLG has the potential to save large companies literally millions of dollars every year.
Some who are reading this can remember the time when we were promised that computers would eliminate the need for paper. Just the opposite has happened. Computers are producing so much data that it has become almost impossible for even the brightest analysts to be able to see the either the big picture or the devil that is in the details in a way that enables them to generate accurate reports. In fact, it takes more time than ever to draft reports – which are longer than ever before – because of the voluminous amounts of data being generated.
The most successful companies achieve their success by delivering big answers to big problems. Arria NLG does exactly that with natural language generation. The company sums up its technology as “a form of artificial intelligence specialized in communicating information which is extracted from complex data sources in natural language (i.e. as if written by a human).” That alone is enough to knock my socks off. What blows my mind is the speed with which it does what it does. But I digress.
First, we need to understand what the NLG software “engine” does. In laymen’s terms (the only ones I understand), the software does essentially two simple things:
- It expertly analyses all of the relevant data being generated by the domain in which it is installed.
- It converts all of that raw data into ordinary, everyday language, just like you are reading right now and the same as Tom Frew sometimes uses.
Now back to the mind-blowing part. Shell Oil (LSE:RDSA) is already using Arria NLG’s technology on some of its oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Reports required of senior engineers based on data generated from hundreds of sensors typically take several hours to complete. Arria’s NLG can write that same report in one minute! That’s why Shell calls NLG a “game changer.” In an existing application with a meteorological client, the Arria NLG software gathers volumes of data, analyzes it and produces a 5,000-word, location-specific weather forecast in less than a minute. That part scares me. What if ADVFN gets this software for the stock market? Alpesh Patel and Azeez Mustapha won’t have anything to do. Tom Frew is safe, because the NLG does not analyze pig semen demand. For more on that topic, click here.
