The Search Insights Report 2020 is out. This has been produced by The Search Network as a service to the search community. There is no charge and no sponsorship. I was honoured to be asked to contribute an article which opens the report. Download the 54 page PDF with the link below: Search Insights 2020_The... Continue Reading →

The pace of Natural Language Processing (NLP) developments continues to accelerate. Very interesting article and research from Google released this month using their massive Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4). Worth a read! Exploring Transfer Learning with T5: the Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer. https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/02/exploring-transfer-learning-with-t5.html

Predicting hydrocarbon plays from text using machine learning and natural language processing. I recently tested the OpportunityFinder Algorithm on a selection of public domain geoscience literature. Only literature published between 1990 to 2010 was used, some time before a major gas discovery was made in the area. The hypothesis was whether the algorithm could surface... Continue Reading →

Happy New Year everyone! A light hearted look at enterprise search evolution to start the New Year. This is an extended summary, the full article will be published in "Search Insights" in March 2020 including the link to digital transformation. The Cambrian explosion occurred more than 500 million years ago, a rapid burst that diversified... Continue Reading →

It's not year end quite yet, but surprised to see visitors to my blog surge past last years total, going past 8,000 this week. I was invited to write my thoughts on the 'future of search' in the enterprise by 'The Search Network' recently. It will be published in 'Search Insights' early 2020. Search engines... Continue Reading →

Enjoyed giving a 3 hour lecture and exercises on text analytics for postgrad students on the Business Analytics MSc at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen today. Fascinating to see students who have majored in subjects as diverse as Finance, Art, Banking and Psychology - developing dual skills - proactively realising how important programming and analytics... Continue Reading →

Earlier this year I wrote about text embeddings / language models and some uses in oil & gas and geoscience Article here Google is deploying its Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm - it has gone mainstream. It is reported this will improve 1 in 10 searches Google Blog Post here Language models and... Continue Reading →

It was Firth who first said a word’s meaning can be somewhat defined by the company it keeps – in other words its word associations. This theory is behind high dimensional vectorspace and many disambiguation techniques to determine the ‘sense’ of a word or phrase when it can have many meanings. What is often not addressed... Continue Reading →

Looking forward to giving the guest lecture & workshop at the end of November on the new MSc Business Analytics course at Robert Gordon University: https://www.rgu.ac.uk/study/courses/1177-pgcert-pgdip-msc-business-analytics

Received core from North Sea core this week. Great samples of source rock, reservoir and seal in a nice old Conoco core box! Text mining geoscience literature using machine learning and natural language processing for clues of new exploration plays, analogues and missed pay is enjoyable ... but you can't beat the real thing 🤓... Continue Reading →