U North Texas Lands Funding to Launch Human Intelligence and Language Technologies Lab
The University of North Texas (UNT) recently landed funding from a private partner to develop new analytics techniques.
The funding comes from Lease Analytics and establishes the Human Intelligence and Language Technologies (HILT) Lab at the university, with the mission to develop new techniques for inferring meaning from specific images, words, phrases or sentences. Housed in the College of Engineering, HILT will study natural language processing, machine learning and cognitive science with a focus on improving machine understanding of text and spoken language.
"The algorithms produced will have potential broad application in industry and government agencies interested in the growing fields of data analytics, and could make skilled human analysts far more productive in analyzing large volumes of current and historic documents," according to a news release about the partnership.
"We will use this fund to find new ways to tag oil and gas leases and contracts with categories of interest, and improve classification, search and clustering beyond word presence," said Eduardo Blanco, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and co-director of the HILT Lab, in a prepared statement.
"We are very excited to support the faculty and students at UNT," said President and CEO of Lease Analytics Tom Agnew in a news release. "UNT has had a preeminent position in both oil and gas accounting and information sciences. Our most capable data scientists have come from the graduate program at UNT. This research will drastically reduce back office error rates, and I look forward to seeing the results of this project."
About the Author
Joshua Bolkan is contributing editor for Campus Technology, THE Journal and STEAM Universe. He can be reached at [email protected].