 News
 Introducing Social Instinct: Provider of Social Media Solutions Blends Multilingual Human Moderation with Innovative Technology
01/29/2013
Appen Butler Hill, a global pioneer in linguistic technology based in Sydney, Australia, announces the formation of Social Instinct, a company providing social media solutions to brands, agencies and publishers using a unique hybrid of expert human moderation and automated technology. Social Instinct will introduce a new social media technology platform in the first half of 2013.
Appen Butler Hill, a global pioneer in linguistic technology based in Sydney, Australia, announces the formation of Social Instinct, a company providing social media solutions to brands, agencies and publishers using a unique hybrid of expert human moderation and automated technology.
Social Instinct, leveraging the language processing resources of parent company Appen Butler Hill (ABH), currently offers customers multilingual social media development, user-generated content moderation and curation, and brand crisis management.
ABH, which provides a comprehensive range of linguistic technology solutions to companies such as Microsoft, Google, Nuance and SAP, acquired two California companies to form Social Instinct: Kontribune, Inc., maker of an online solution that helps all types of communities engage their members through a unique story-telling approach, and Wikman Remer Consulting, a Ruby on Rails consultancy offering social media product development. Social Instinct is based in San Rafael, California.
"Social media is all about empowering conversation and engagement through voice, text and video. Our language processing expertise can detect the nuances of all multi-modal activity, nurturing it so participants want to stay involved, contribute or take action," says Lisa Braden-Harder, chief executive officer of ABH. “When combined with Social Instinct’s technology, our customers can make full use of social media for increased engagement and profitability, without the pitfalls.”
New Social Media Platform Coming Spring, 2013 - Social Instinct will introduce a new social media technology platform in the first half of 2013. This proprietary social platform will allow brands and publishers to moderate and curate their user-generated content with accuracy and throughput not previously available. The platform will integrate ABH’s crowd-based services to provide clients with a complete social media solution, as well as be available for partnerships with existing human moderation firms. The product will help companies easily connect and interact with customers or employees, encouraging them to contribute, share and take action in a way that is beneficial for their brands.
“Moving into social media services and products is a logical expansion for ABH since social communication is already at the heart of our business,” continued Lisa Braden-Harder. “We were very fortunate to have found two companies that share our core values and belief in the power of community.”
Paul Remer and Johan Wikman, founders of Kontribune and Wikman Remer Consulting, will remain as senior executives at Social Instinct. Both are veterans of the enterprise software and social media markets, with experience at companies such as Autodesk, Siterra, Piczo, Zynga and Lithium. Recently, they were principals of Keibi Technologies, a company that developed a successful platform for analyzing and ranking user-generated content.
“When we met with Lisa and the ABH team, it was clear that we shared a passion for the opportunities presented by combining technology and human judgment,” said Paul Remer, senior vice president of the new Social Instinct division. “Joining ABH gives us the resources and reach to offer our products and services to a whole new category of customers, as well as develop the next generation platform for social media engagement.”
About Appen Butler Hill - Appen Butler Hill is a global leader in the field of linguistic Solutions, serving companies in 60 countries and supporting over 100 languages. With expertise in Speech, Search and Text Analytics combined with major operations in the US and Australia, and local teams in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, Appen Butler Hill provides clients with the highest quality language services and solutions.
Contact Information
Paul Remer
Social Instinct
www.socialinstinct.com
(415) 378-4670
Leadership Transition at Appen Butler Hill 2013 marks the beginning of the company’s next exciting phase of growth
9th January 2013
Appen Butler Hill has announced today that the company has promoted Lisa Braden-Harder from President to the role of Chief Executive Officer. Former CEO Bill Pulver is transitioning to a non-executive director role on the ABH Board and also taking on the role of CEO of the Australian Rugby Union.
January 9th 2013 – Appen Butler Hill has announced today that the company has promoted Lisa Braden-Harder from President to the role of Chief Executive Officer. Former CEO Bill Pulver is transitioning to a non-executive director role on the ABH Board and also taking on the role of CEO of the Australian Rugby Union. These two changes will take effect immediately.
Lisa Braden-Harder commented that “we now have a superb quality team with a truly global footprint and a business that is poised for its next exciting phase of growth. I am working with the ABH Executive Team to make sure we are taking full advantage of the opportunities in front of us and supporting our clients in the best possible way. We have just finalised the 2013 budget plans which suggest we have another year of stunning growth ahead, and the immediate challenge is to execute our plans effectively. I am excited with the opportunity to take up the CEO role and work with our amazing team to help this company realise its true potential over the next few years.”
Commenting on the changes, Bill said “I am extremely proud of what the ABH team has achieved over the last three years. We completed the merger of Appen & Butler Hill, integrated RTG International and Wikman Remer, and implemented a number of constructive employee- and client-based initiatives. As a result we have tripled the size of the business while expanding into new areas such as Content Analytics, Crowdsourcing, and Social media. Throughout all of this Lisa has been my partner in running the company and I congratulate her as my logical successor on her appointment as CEO. ”
The Chairman of the Board of Directors, Chris Vonwiller, said “we thank Bill for his leadership over the last three years. This has been a transformational period for the company and I am pleased to report that Bill will remain involved in the company as both a shareholder and a non-executive director on our board.”
“On behalf of the full board I would also like to congratulate Lisa on her appointment. We are extremely lucky to have this calibre of executive available to step into the Chief Executive’s role at a time when we are poised to enter our next exciting growth phase. With 80% of our revenue coming from US based clients it also makes a great deal of sense to have the CEO based in their close proximity. Lisa is also well positioned to lead our management team across all geographies.”
For any inquiries, please contact Lisa Braden-Harder at lbharder@appenbutlerhill.com or +1 866 673 6996.
Chris Vonwiller Lisa Braden-Harder William Pulver
Chairman CEO Non-Executive Director
About Appen Butler Hill
Appen Butler Hill is a new global leader in the field of linguistic Solutions, serving companies in 60 countries and supporting over 100 languages. With expertise in Speech, Search and Text Analytics combined with major operations in the US and Australia, and local teams in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, Appen Butler Hill provides clients with the highest quality language services and solutions. Products and services include: data collection, transcription, data annotation, search relevance evaluation and linguistic consulting in a wide range of areas and over 100 languages with the largest licensable database of lexicons in the world. Appen Butler Hill has won numerous awards including Australian Exporter of the Year and the BRW Fast 100 in 2012.
Appen Butler Hill Wins More Industry Awards
9th November 2012
Appen Butler Hill continues to receive outstanding accolades as its clients continue to support the company with its vision to be the global leader in linguistic technology solutions.
Appen Butler Hill continues to receive outstanding accolades as its clients continue to support the company with its vision to be the global leader in linguistic technology solutions.
Appen Butler Hill was ranked 42nd in the 2012 BRW Fast 100. This follows its ranking earlier this year in the top 10 of the Fast Start 100.
This week the company was also named as a top 5 finalist in the Growth Company of the Year Awards. The Australian Growth Company Awards are designed to recognise Australia's fastest growing companies by celebrating and recognising:
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individual and team efforts that result in company growth
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sustainable growth business practices
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the hard work of those involved in putting together Australia's leading private equity transactions, and
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the efforts of Australian CEOs who make significant contributions to their company's growth
Bill Pulver, CEO, commented: “This is fantastic recognition for our hard working team. We are particularly grateful for our growing number of clients that continue to look towards Appen Butler Hill to help them solve their challenging problems and accelerate their own growth and innovation.”
Appen Butler Hill at ICASSP 2012
Feb 26, 2012
Appen Butler Hill is proud to announce it will be an exhibitor at ICASSP 2012 (International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing). The conference will take place from March 25 to March in Kyoto, Japan. Please come and visit us at Booth 1.
Appen Butler Hill is proud to announce it will be an exhibitor at ICASSP 2012 (International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing). The conference will take place from March 25 to March in Kyoto, Japan. Please come and visit us at our stand.
Appen and Butler Hill Merge Operations To Create Global Leader in Linguistic Solutions
Mar 03, 2011
Appen Inc. (Appen) and the Butler Hill Group LLC (Butler Hill) announced today that they have merged their operations to create a new global leader in linguistic solutions. The combination of Appen's leadership in the Speech domain with Butler Hill's expertise in Search and Text Analytics will enable the combined company to offer its clients the most complete and high-quality set of linguistic solutions. The new merged entity will be called Appen Butler Hill Inc.
Butler Hill Helps Microsoft Research with Human-Machine Conversational System Development
Today, your mobile phone understands your voice commands and search queries, and online photo services recognize faces when you upload your pictures. Tomorrow, you might have a conversation with an avatar that feels so realistic it makes you smile at your onscreen dialog partner. Read about how Butler Hill supports a cutting edge Microsoft Research project through audio and video stream annotations.
“It’s a hard problem.” Or was that a “heart problem?” - Challenges and Opportunities for Speech Technologies
Attending SpeechTEK 2010, an annual conference and exhibition for speech technology companies and professionals, provided us at Butler Hill with great new insights about the challenges, opportunities, and trends in the industry. It was especially exciting to hear how strong of a role linguistics play in the evolution of speech technology and applications. Read on for our take-aways on what's buzzing in the speech technology industry.
While there are many similarities between speech technology and text based language technology development, there are also a lot of unique challenges to processing and producing speech data. The ambiguity introduced by homophones (words that are spelled differently but sound the same, making a “hard problem” very different from a “heart problem” in a medical record transcription context) and the speech data variety across different speakers are just the tip of the iceberg. People also tend to use different vocabulary when they talk compared to when they write; e.g., a customer might use more idiosyncratic words when they call a customer care center than when they write an email or comment on a company blog, since they are often biased by the immediate context of the company website and the “official” product terminology in the latter scenario. Also, speakers tend to adapt to their dialog partner, which is when cultural issues come into play like variations when talking to someone with a perceived age difference, or someone with a regional accent – characteristics that are much less apparent when entering a written dialog. All of these factors make speech a particularly intriguing focal point for new technologies and applications.
There is lots of energy around consumer focused mobile voice applications, driven by continued strong growth in smart phones worldwide and the fact that network capacity, database and storage capacities have finally caught up with the requirements of speech recognition and text-to-speech technology. As users become more and more attached to their mobile phones and devices, they expect them to really “work” for them and help them accomplish tasks in new ways and in new situations: Up to half of some mobile application’s usage occurs while driving, which calls for “eye free” and hands free modalities. Voice enabled applications are the answer, and need to move towards truly conversational interfaces. Interesting challenges are presented through the fact that users might use several voice enabled applications at the same time, so the ideal speech recognition engine can process voice input across different applications and domains rather than requiring the user to provide clunky voice commands for switching between constrained domain apps. We anticipate seeing increased efforts to fully integrate speech into the OS and grounding it in a broad coverage syntactic and semantic representation layer.
Enterprises, meanwhile, are looking to balance cost saving demands with customer experience requirements for their IVRs (interactive voice response systems, as in phone banking or call center routing systems.) Many large global corporations, from airlines to car rental agencies to health care providers, attended the conference to survey new solutions for efficiently handling incoming customer calls. Such a solution might include deep natural language processing (NLP), which is especially valuable for first-time caller and long tail scenarios. Beyond the general challenges of implementing a high quality automated system, linguistic and cultural challenges abound once you adapt the system for new markets. For example, a voice navigation system in the Japanese market might use a voice that sounds friendly, animated, and eager, demonstrating “helpfulness” – a style that would not work in the German market, where the same system might use a voice conveying “confidence” instead.
Another topic with a lot of buzz at SpeechTEK was Speech Analytics. While parts of these solution overlap with Text Analytics (mining unstructured text data and turning it into actionable insights), speech analytics has additional information to work with, from prosody (intonation, stress, and rhythm) and pitch to pauses in the utterance to how loud the speaker gets, which helps analyze and categorize data. One might think of this as “sentiment analysis with additional dimensions.” There are lots of valuable applications for speech analytics in the enterprise, e.g. mining customer data from call centers, and elsewhere as in the legal field and in forensics.
We at Butler Hill look forward to continued partnering with companies developing consumer and enterprise focused speech technologies – and we’ll see you at SpeechTEK 2011!
How far will machine translation take sentiment analysis technology?
There has been a lot of buzz around sentiment analysis, a text analytics application that aims to extract and classify emotions, attitudes and opinions from unstructured text sources. To respond to the need for capturing “global sentiment”, some sentiment analysis providers are looking to machine translation as a cheap and fast way to extend their offerings into new languages.
We at Butler Hill wanted to explore how machine translation holds up in this context. We designed an experiment to investigate the impact of machine translation on precision and recall of sentiment analysis. Our findings provide valuable insights to anyone in the sentiment analysis industry with global customers.
The Meaning of Meaning: Semantic Technologies
Butler Hill attended SemTech 2010, a large conference on semantic technologies. Read on for our take on how semantic technologies will help enterprises, organizations and consumers make sense of the massive amounts of data that lives on the web and in internal data stores.
When we at Butler Hill talk about semantics, more often than not we use the term in its linguistic sense, referring to the meaning of words or sentences in text and speech. There is, however, another “semantic universe” out there, in which semantics refers to techniques for incorporating meaning in the expression, storage, analysis and retrieval of structured data. At last week’s Semantic Technologies conference in San Francisco, SemTech 2010, both of these senses were represented.
Much of the conference focused on the challenges of and opportunities for dealing with structured data: data in enterprise knowledge bases, product catalogs, government databases. Data that is mostly hidden from current search engines like Google and Bing – and there is lots of it: some estimate that there is 500 times more structured data than unstructured data, with billions of data tables out on the web. Much of the “semantic web” or “web 3.0” discussions are about creating and utilizing formats for structuring, linking, and surfacing this data to enterprises and consumers. Ontologies – formal representations of concepts, terms, and relationships that model a specific domain – will play a big part in this effort. Domain specific, culture specific, and linguistic knowledge will be needed as existing ontologies are integrated into the semantic web, and/or domain or application specific ontologies are created through automatic or human assisted approaches.
Other interesting challenges arise for dealing with the massive quantities of unstructured data (including enterprise documents, traditional media content, user generated content in social media). The sheer explosion of unstructured text data demands sophisticated tools and approaches for evaluating, extracting, classifying and analyzing this data. We see lots of opportunities for helping companies and organizations tackle these challenges, from assisting with machine learning text mining techniques through the creation of “gold standard” by qualified annotators, to using our linguistic and cultural know-how to support the creation of domain specific grammars and the extraction of entities.
Data isn’t as neatly “siloed” as the distinction between structured and unstructured data suggests. In reality, structured and unstructured sources often exist side by side, and need to be integrated in order to truly mine and share information across the web. We are curious and excited to see how the semantic web unfolds!
Text Analytics and the Global Challenge
Part of Butler Hill’s leadership team just came back from the 6th Annual Text Analytics Summit in Boston, where we connected with text analytics companies and their customers. Read on for more on the challenges faced by the text analytics industry and how Butler Hill helps overcome those.
There has been a lot of buzz surrounding the text analytics industry, focused on turning unstructured text into actionable data. Applications range from analyzing electronic medical records in the health care industry to mining customer feedback from call center logs to detecting emerging consumer trends through monitoring social media. Sentiment analysis (the identification of positive and –often the more salient- negative opinions and emotions customers have about a product or service) continues to grow strongly.
And slowly but surely, text analytics companies like Clarabridge, Attensity, Lexalytics, Endeca and Provalis are “going global”. As their customers are asking for solutions that extend beyond the US English market, the technologists behind text analytics are scrambling to adapt their systems to process and analyze data in non-English languages. The most promising text analytics approaches include NLP (natural language processing) techniques like stemming, parsing, entity extraction, and the use of lexicons with morphological, syntactical, and semantic tags. Such techniques and resources are not trivial to replicate for other languages, and text analytics companies are looking to a partner like Butler Hill to help them create an efficient and scalable process for providing global solutions to their clients.
We are ready and excited to tackle the challenges text analytics companies face in transitioning their technology into new languages. Whether we draw from our expertise in creating rules for named entity extraction and POS (part of speech) tagging, experience collecting and tagging corpora for sentiment analysis evaluations, or helping clients analyze the pros and cons of crowdsourcing approaches for data annotation, we offer a broad range of services for supporting our clients with quality solutions, always customized to their specific needs. The opportunities abound!
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