This week we have articles from Walid Saba and Sarah Scire. News comes from Sinequa, Sitecore, WP Engine, John Snow Labs, and Copyright Clearance Center.


Opinion / Analysis

Machine learning won’t solve natural language understanding

Walid Saba argues that “it is time to re-think our approach to natural language understanding, since the ‘big data’ approach to NLU is implausible and flawed”, and that the main problem is due to what he calls the “missing text phenomenon”. We recommended an earlier article of his where he discussed this in the context of ontologies and knowledge graphs, but this article is more focused on the key problem and his best explanation for a broad audience. Given the importance of both natural language processing and natural language understanding for machine learning applications, combined with issues surrounding the dependence on large language models, this is an important read. Afterwards see Saba’s response to objections to the article here.

https://thegradient.pub/machine-learning-wont-solve-the-natural-language-understanding-challenge/

How news publishers are turning casual infrequent readers into paying subscribers

The longer you’re in the market with your subscription product, the more light-reading subscribers you are going to have,” the report notes. “The majority of conversions come from light readers. The proportion of conversions that come from this cohort grows the longer that you are in the market.

Plus, approximately 40% subscribers are “zombies”. Note the report (which I have not read) mentioned is about and for news publishers, so mileage may vary.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/how-news-publishers-are-turning-casual-infrequent-readers-into-paying-subscribers/

More reading…

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Content technology news

Sinequa announces Starter Apps

Helps customers build and deploy custom Insight Apps with tailored search experiences faster and more easily.
https://gilbane.com/2021/10/sinequa-announces-starter-apps/

Sitecore launches Sitecore Manager Experience Cloud

The cloud-native CMS (content management system) offering is a new addition to the Sitecore Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
https://gilbane.com/2021/10/sitecore-launches-sitecore-manager-experience-cloud/

John Snow Labs announces free no-code natural language processing tools

The data labeling solution for teams enables annotation of documents, images, and videos. The NLP Server grants access to pretrained NLP models.
https://gilbane.com/2021/10/john-snow-labs-announces-free-no-code-natural-language-processing-tools/

WP Engine launches Atlas Content Modeler

ACM is a WordPress CMS plugin to create custom post types and fields for headless WordPress sites. ACM integrates seamlessly with WPGraphQL.
https://gilbane.com/2021/10/wp-engine-launches-atlas-content-modeler/

CCC adds SciBite Semantic Search capability within RightFind Navigate

Enables researchers to find relevant content more quickly through contextualized discovery that is based on machine learning and smart data.
https://gilbane.com/2021/10/ccc-adds-scibite-semantic-search-capability-within-rightfind-navigate/

All content technology news


The Gilbane Advisor is curated by Frank Gilbane for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. The focus is on strategic technologies. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

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