Now in its 7th year, the Linguamatics Spring Users Conference is Europe’s premier text mining conference. Delegates were provided with an excellent opportunity to explore trends in text mining & text analytics, natural language processing (NLP) and knowledge discovery.
As usual, the conference kicked off with hands-on training workshops, with sessions for beginners, advanced users and administrators. Delegates couldn’t wait to get their hands on the new features of I2E 4.2, and pick the brains of our Application Specialists and Chief Technology Officer.
In the evening, we hosted a welcome reception at the wonderful Fitzwilliam Museum. Delegates were blown away by the marble stairwell and the opulent gold ceiling. We were surrounded by great artworks by impressionists such as Pissaro, Monet and Cezanne, leaving the delegates suitably impressed.
The grand ceiling at the Fitzwilliam Museum
On Tuesday, the main conference sessions were held and we were welcomed by our Executive Chairman, John M. Brimacombe who presented the Linguamatics corporate mission and an update on the triad of critical functionality in the I2E platform – with NLP at its heart.
Throughout the day we heard from end-users on their experiences with I2E. Jasmin Saric from Boehringer Ingelheim and David Hollembaek from Microsoft enthused people with their case study on using I2E to semantically enrich Boehringer Ingelheim’s enterprise search system (based on Microsoft SharePoint 2013), which transformed the user-experience of enterprise search in this proof of concept. According to Jasmin, his colleagues can’t wait to have a full production version.
Delegates at the Spring Users Conference 2014
Other user presentations included Raul Rodriguez-Esteban from Roche, who presented his work on Text mining to Support Model-Based Meta-Analysis in Clinical Drug Development (by extracting treatment, demographics, outcome and other information from various clinical trial databases).
We also heard from Sten Christensen, Novo Nordisk on his work using text mining to Track External Haemophilia Activities – they have been able to replace ~600 classical searches into four I2E query categories, and present the resulting information to the end-users in visual form, making their analysis much more efficient.
The conference provided new and potential users with a timely update on the latest I2E product developments: including an overview of Linked Servers, which allows streamlined access to content by linking enterprise servers with content servers on the cloud; enhanced chemical querying capabilities; progress on healthcare applications of I2E; and integrated visualization tools.
Chief Technology Officer David Milward’s forward-looking technology road map received a great deal of interest from delegates.
This year we invited a few of our partners to exhibit and participate in 5-minute lightning round presentations: we heard from ChemAxon, Copyright Clearance Center, Thomson Reuters and Accelrys on their solutions and how they integrate with Linguamatics I2E.
Discussions carried on throughout the day and into the evening during dinner at St Catherine’s College, one of Cambridge University’s oldest colleges.
Wednesday morning gave delegates the chance to engage with I2E once more via hands-on training with the Web Services API, a workshop for intermediate users and an advanced querying clinic for expert users.
The whole event was a great success topped off with some fabulous feedback from all our attendees around the conference and the software – to quote one of the feedback forms “the [Linguamatics] technical support is fantastic, it is one of the best of the companies we work with…”.
Presentations which have been approved to share are available on I2Edia and by email request.
Thanks to everyone who attended and contributed to the Linguamatics Spring Users Conference 2014, we look forward to seeing you at the Text Mining Summit in Newport, RI or in Cambridge, UK next year!
