LinguisticAgents is an NLP company based in Israel that provides a natural language interpretation service designed to be used as a middle layer in applications. I spoke with Ari Applbaum a while ago about their service and have never had the time to do a longer post on the company. A commenter on a recent post has nudged this company back on to my radar.
Functionally, what LA offers is a service which will provide parse trees for any input you throw at it. While this service doesn't provide all of the pieces required for integration of an NLP solution in most applications (for example, some of the disambiguation is left up to the client) it does provide a simple interaction which will allow developers to rapidly prototype applications that could take advantage of NLP. I'm assuming that if the results look good, a customer could elect to bring the technology closer to the application rather than rely on a web based interaction (which would never scale with anything other than the most modest data rates).
LinguisticAgents use a novel approach to syntactic analysis called NanoSyntax:
Every word of a sentence contains a significant amount of complex information. Words are communicated in a particular order, via sentences. Humans, naturally having the correct decoding algorithms, effortlessly decode messages on a subconscious level. The human brain takes the information a person wants to communicate and packages it into encoded packages - words. That is why accurate understanding of Human Language cannot be achieved using common computer science methods alone. Computers, lacking the necessary algorithms, are unable to remove the encryption and are unable to understand sentences in Natural Language (i.e. , Hebrew, English, Russian , etc.).
The theoretical linguistics of the 80s and 90s made progress in finding a solution to this problem, but the true giant leap in NLP has taken place over the last few years, through a system called Nanosyntax, which has made the code breaking of natural language possible.
Linguistic Agents' software is the only natural language software available today based on the latest linguistic theory,
NanoSyntax.
I've had a little scratch around the web on this topic, but haven't found anything immediately readable that intuitively captures what this approach is really about. The text on the company's site certainly seems to dismiss more common approaches to syntactic and semantic processing (such as LFG - the formalism used by Powerset). In addition, much of the battle between the new breed of linguistically motivated application providers (web search included) is going to be over basic lexical resources that provide the necessary mappings between lexically and semantically related concepts. On this note, it has been interesting to see a number of papers presented here at AAAI 2007 on mining Wikipedia for ontological and taxonomic information. In addition, at last nights reception, the Freebase booth was seeing a good rate of traffic to hear Kurt Bollacker's animated demonstration of the system/data.