Converseon Hires Linguistics Expert

Natural language processing expert Jason Baldridge has joined social media agency Converseon as Senior Data Scientist, with a remit to help the firm develop conversation mining technologies.

New York-based Converseon combines automated and human analysis to provide clients with a suite of customisable 'listening solutions' to help them map, monitor and react to social media conversations. Last September, the firm acquired analytics and marketing technology supplier Social Graphiti, which enables users to target and retarget consumers based on the sentiments they express online, and their areas of interest.

Baldridge joins with more than fifteen years' research, consulting and software development experience in natural language processing, and is currently an Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1999, he co-founded the OpenNLP project and created the OpenNLP Toolkit, to provide a platform from which research can collaborate on NLP (neuro linguistic programming) projects.

Baldridge currently sits on the editorial boards of Computational Linguistics, Computing Science and Engineering, and Linguistics in Language Technology, and he has served as area chair in Syntax and Parsing (2008) and NLP Applications (2012) for the conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, comments: 'While there are many social media monitoring solutions on the market, very few have the intelligent meta-data needed to find real insights and meaning. Jason's addition to the team, together with our innovative technology infrastructure and machine learning approach, will enable us to continue to lead the market in best data quality and help define the next generation of social media intelligence.'

In his new role, Baldridge joins Dr Philip Resnick, who works as Converseon's lead scientist, while serving as a Professor at the University of Maryland in the Department of Linguistics and at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.

Web site: www.converseon.com .