Q&A with Matthew Gould Chief Strategy Officer at Arria NLG PLC (LON:NLG)

Arria NLG PLC (LON:NLG) Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Gould caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their 6th US patent

 

Q1: Firs off then, congratulations on your 6th patent granted by the US patent office, can you give us a little bit more background on what this entails?

A1: Sure, so this is very exciting for us, it’s our 6th, and we’re on a roll now with our patents. The key points here with our patent strategy are firstly that they’re being awarded and awarded strongly in the face of the changes that have occurred globally especially in the US patent market, it changes how patents are used so we’re getting our core technology, our core NLG patents away at some speed. This latest one is interesting because it’s a method and apparatus, the formal name is ‘Method And Apparatus For Updating A Previously Generated Text’, it’s foundational for anyone, any company out there who’s looking to generate a natural language generation solution to have their data speak to them in a natural way will probably need this bit of tech, will probably require this bit of IP somewhere. So it’s good that we’ve got it and it’s good that we’ve been recognised as the originators of that technology.

 

Q2: So what specifically is the patent protecting and how important are patents for Arria NLG?

A2: So what this patent covers is a very human attribute to communication. So if you think about a person writing a report, whether it be a report on the health of the business or a report of the health of a child in a hospital or a report on the status of a portfolio in investment circles, if it’s a person writing that report and they’re asked to re-write that report as fresh data becomes available, they’ll usually re-write the report with consideration to the one they provided earlier, it’s a more natural way to write reports. As people, we understand from a communication point of view what’s gone before, to match in tone and in style what you’re subsequently delivering, we do that without thinking about it, almost subconsciously. So natural language generation, you’re trying to evoke the same thing, you don’t want dry robotic sentences, you don’t want dry robotic narrative, you want to communicate as people do, that’s what Arria sets out to do. What this patent covers is a core part of that process, it says I’ve written reports, they system’s written reports, the underlying data has changed, it might have changed a second ago, it might have changed an hours ago, a day ago, week ago, whatever the time period is, but I’m going to be conscious of what I wrote before and carry forward the attributes of that communication into this new report. So it’s a natural functionality within that core tools that are needed to convert data into communication, to convert data into language. We’re very proud of the patent, we’re very proud of the team and it’s important for Arria because it’s another key point of differentiation from our competition, both our small competition and the big technology companies out there. We’re really saying Arria is natural language generation, look at our patents, look at the reality of them, we don’t just have one or two, we have four, five, six and you can see they’re coming out regularly, there are more to come, watch this space, we’re going to own the NLG space. So tactically, financially and strategically, our patent programme is hugely important to us.

 

Q3: Where else do you consider important territories to secure patent protection and are you pursuing those?

A3: There’s plenty more to come! So we’ve got this great system at Arria NLG, I’d say half of our developers are close to are PhD’s in the field of Natural Language Generation Computational Linguistics and we reward them financially for their innovation and there’s a big hopper of our intellectual property that is slowly being refined with our patent attorneys, Alston Bird, in the States dropping these patents out in the US. Over time you’ll see the revenues from the sales of our NLG platform and the capital that we’ve got spent in extending those patents, not just in the US and Europe where they are but out into Asia as well. So there’s more to come so I can tell the market and the ones that are there will spread their effect globally over the next couple of years.

 

Q4: How does this feature benefit Arria NLG’s clients and how do they use it?

A4: Our clients are using it now in a way and it works best when they don’t even realise it’s working, it works because the communications that they’re getting from their systems are so natural. So if you think about our use case, let’s just take one where you’ve got a large firm who wants to generate a health of business report so give me the report as though ‘Dan the accountant’ has just written it as a review of our cash flow of our sales forecast, press a button and naturally generates that report for you, just as though ‘Dan’ would’ve written it and people receiving that report might not realise that ‘Dan’ himself hadn’t written that. It comes across as so fluid, so natural in its construction, so like a person has written it that they think someone actually has, this patent is embedded in that process so that clarity of text, that naturalness of narrative that this patent is part of.

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