Synthesys™ is Digital Reasoning’s platform for data analytics. Synthesys makes analyzing unstructured data as simple and reliable as using a conventional structured database.
Unlike most solutions that return a large batch of relevant documents, Synthesys focuses on entities (i.e. the people, places, and things) and provides tools that visualize the connections across the entire data set. Analysts can see “patterns in haystacks” of data and navigate between key actors and events across millions of documents or records.
There are two key components to enable this level of analysis and discovery. The first is a top-down learning system that extracts and categorizes entities. Once the user designates relevant categories (such as people and locations) Synthesys reads the data and marks entities that fit those categories. Because this is done through a patented process that looks at how the terms are used, Synthesys finds not only the people and locations the user is expecting, but those with similar associations—often surfacing relevant information that would have otherwise been undetected.
The second component in the Sythesys platform is a technology that finds the elements in the data that are semantic associations (or close relatives) of a term of interest. This could be a variation of a person’s name (such as an alias) or it may be a property of an entity. This technology (covered by US Patent 7,249,117) gives the system a human-like ability to learn what words mean based on how the entity is referenced and used in context. The process is fully automated and requires no prior knowledge or models.
Complex discovery analysis demands tools that surpass conventional key word search. While a search might begin with a key word, productivity and confidence are exponentially greater when Synthesys surfaces all related entities and events. Consider a search for “nuclear power plants.” Conventional tools would miss “uranium reprocessing facility” or “spent rods,” entities which might be critical to the task at hand. Not only will Synthesys find these hidden gems, but it will visualize connections between concepts of interest and allow drill-down into the relevant document for deeper analysis.
Get a copy of the Synthesys white paper here.
