Delvinia Expands Virtual Moderator CRIS

Canadian data collection firm Delvinia has updated its AI-enabled virtual moderator CRIS, which now 'knows' when to follow up a response, based on its completeness compared to responses from preceding interviews.

Founded in 1998, the Delvinia Group of companies includes a portfolio of digital businesses, including the AskingCanadians and AskingAmericans data collection firms; Delvinia Custom Solutions; and research automation platform Methodify. The group says CRIS behaves as a moderator would, with a discussion guide programmed to enable the tool to ask questions, and then follow up when the answer seems incomplete, or to obtain more information.

In its original iteration, the trigger for CRIS to follow up was generic and based on expected word count, which needed to be defined for each question in advance. The new version follows up more specifically, to get detail on subjects that have the most relevance. An NLP tagging technique is employed to tag parts of speech, and process and extract noun phrases (known as 'chunks'). If any of the keywords are contained in the noun chunk(s), the chunk is added to a follow-up phrase, (eg, can you elaborate more on...?) Because the keyword is ranked by score, the firm is able to select the appropriate noun chunk if more than one is selected, and if no noun chunks are extracted, CRIS follows up, using the original decision tree logic.

Commenting on the upgrade, President and Chief Innovation Officer Steve Mast (pictured) said: 'We are excited for this release as it continues the evolution of CRIS to better replicate the moderator experience. By having high-quality virtual tools available for qualitative research, we make it more readily available for projects of all kinds'.

Web site: www.delvinia.com .