With the end of the Australian financial year behind us, it seems a good time to reflect on our progress.

While 2 years ago we completed the prototype for a grammar tool, we have now finalised a machine that not only recognises grammar, but also handles the more common language elements

• conjunctions, in noun phrases, vern phrases and predicate phrases
• phrase ambiguity and
• the identification of word meaning based on its sentence use, wheverever it is found in a sentence.  

The technology has been taken a long way past the simple grammar tool, and now it is time to work on integrating this into other's products. We want to provide an improved user experience with web, phone and computer applications.

John Ball

February 17, 2008 - Web site nearing completion

The three main Thinking Solutions web site updates are nearing completion. The changes were designed to provide a standardised environment, provide secure access to selected members and enable the demonstration of future tools to members. Last night, the architecture was deployed to our three domains: thinkingsolutions.com.au, thinkingsolutions.net.au and patom.com.au.

Please explore the new environment and let us know if there is anything amiss or needing further clarification.

In terms of content, we have expanded our technology tour to further explain the capabilities of the pattern-matching paradigm. There are now 7 example pages illustrating some of the challenges overcome in the English language that were needed in order to communicate with people. While it is useful to have a single engine driving multiple languages, the exciting lure of global travel without need for a human translator is a compelling goal and hence the motivation to focus on business for the moment!

Please watch out for more public discussions moving forward. Communications of our capabilities and the search for investors will take priority to gain adoption of the technologies in the main areas that will benefit in the short term. 

John Ball 

With the Christmas period drawing to a close, it seems a good time to reflect on our progress in December towards the grammar tool.

While a holiday instead of work may have been a good idea, we chose instead to see how much further we could push the technology, keeping the core engine unchanged, but adding new patterns to the existing ones in the form of the Wordnet dictionary.

While the dictionary, from the Princeton source, needed a bit of massaging to fit, it did so nicely adding approximately 150,000 words and phrases, and 300,000 new connections. It also came with a number of ambiguities that had not previously been an issue. Who uses the word "are" to describe an area, I ask you? Fortunately, it is not a big task to add another pattern to the existing mix to remove the impact of the redundancies.

The major benefit in having a world-class dictionary within the Project Turing code comes in the form of its associations. By providing multiple word-senses to the program, it is able to use the word and phrase hierarchies to determine appropriate meanings of the words. In other words, it makes the program an intelligent dictionary by firstly identifying valid word senses within the sentence's grammar. And further, and much better still, where additional patterns are stored, the program shows only the word senses that are valid within the semantic patterns available (the program has no context pattern store at this stage).

The new features will be displayed on the web site as samples in the next week.

We will re-assess the impact to our product schedule by the end of the month. As the benefits in the grammar tool providing an intelligent dictionary appear to be more compelling than just a grammar tool, it is likely that we will rework our product plan to incorporate the additional capabilities.

Watch this space, and yes, Happy New Year to you all!

John Ball  

The Thinking Solutions company has previously posted blog content on our web site.  To keep all the information in one place (this new blog system!), the previous posts are being recorded below.

17 November 2007

With the completion of the pilot testing, a number of features are being incorporated into the windows-based software. Investigation is also underway regarding the alternatives for an online service and the merits of online versus computer-based language analysis.

31 August 2007

Thinking Solutions issues press release announcing "the success of its new programming approach that recognises languages". The announcement includes the plan for the first product to be launched in February 2008.

15 January 2007

Thinking Solutions decides to suspend additional R&D work on Project Turing to focus on the creation of a product to help school students to learn about their language. This capability is required for the other programs successfully piloted - including language translation. The first product will apply to the English language. The program's structure will utilise object oriented concepts to enable re-use across future products.

4 January 2007

Thinking Solutions filing of provision patent specification for the Linguistic Analysis invention completed.

28 November 2006

Thinking Solutions Pty Ltd was incorporated today. It is now a privately owned Australian-based registered company under the Corporations Act 2001 as defined by ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

15 November 2006

Thinking Solutions is currently undertaking a review of its business model to consider the best applications to bring to market first. This web site has also been simplified, removing many of the theoretical pages which provide the source for the proposed book. The current business plan is to "productise" the grammar engine to produce translation machines and teaching aids for the English language.

October 2006

The first successful differentiation of a word into its appropriate meaning has taken place, identifying a number of meanings of the verb "to run".

September 2006

Project Turing has resulted in the successful parsing of a test set of English sentences and is proving to be both speedy and robust. A set of additional patterns representing locations, horror movies and Australian prime ministers demonstrates the system's ability to parse sentences with additional semantic content.

18 April 2006

We are back in 2006 after a period of focus on development efforts.

March 2006

Project Turing has been initiated. The intent of this project is to produce a machine to converse with. The project will be conducted in 3 phases: (a) the creation of a parsing engine to take English sentences and convert them into their grammatical constituents, (b) the generation of sentences from a set of words that are consistent with grammatical requirements and (c) the storage of semantic details to enable conversation.

20 November 2005

The web site refresh is nearing completion. We'd appreciate it if you would please keep providing suggestions about the way we have organised the site! It seems independent views help us to present the material most effectively.

8 November 2005

The plan remains to complete the current phase of web updates by 14 November. A number of changes should become apparent including the easier navigation and reduced page duplication.

30 October 2005

We have added a number of additional articles previously submitted for publication. These will be incorporated in a simpler format into the web site moving forward to reduce the amount of existing duplication. At the moment, the best way to get a high-level understanding of patomic theory is to read the home page, the general page and then the introduction to patoms page.

26 October 2005

This site is currently being redeveloped to better communicate the objectives of Thinking Solutions and to provide a clearer picture of the new brain model - patomic theory.