Natural Language Generation: Anytime, Anywhere

In the most recent edition of Analytics Week, Jelani Harper does a deep dive on Arria Connect, the latest from Arria NLG. Check out "Natural Language Generation: Anytime, Anywhere," below, which details the new SDK's ability to bring Arria's natural language generation technology into any API-based platform.
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Organizations are increasingly turning to Natural Language Generation (NLG) to supplement the insights they receive from conventional dashboards, visualizations, and workflows. Competitive business intelligence platforms incorporate NLG as part of their suite of capabilities to assist with interpreting the results of analytics.

According to Arria NLG CEO Sharon Daniels, NLG’s written summaries ensure “information contained within the data’s insights can be quickly delivered across the enterprise and communicated in the form of language, which is still the greatest form of communication for ease of understanding.”

Today, organizations can access this cognitive computing technology as part of their own bespoke solutions for data analysis. There are options that make available enterprise class NLG via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs). Thus, instead of developing their own NLG platforms or integrating with third-party analytics vendors, organizations can now “add NLG as a language layer to any dashboard,” Daniels confirmed.

Ubiquitous NLG

Making this subset of Natural Language Processing available through APIs and SDKs is critical for expanding its presence throughout the enterprise and the data landscape as a whole. As Daniels explained, “Because of our API-based architecture, we basically can send and receive API calls to transfer and integrate NLG into a platform, a dashboard, or even a web based custom application.” This approach spawns a number of prominent benefits, the most immediate of which is the capability to support NLG in a broadening array of settings. “There are thousands of dashboards, everything from mini-dashboards for financial services, sales, marketing, real estate; [there are] many, many dashboards that are delivering that data in the form of typically a dashboard or visuals, we can integrate with,” Daniels affirmed.

Moreover, organizations have much more license as to where they deploy this facet of statistical Artificial Intelligence, since it can be outside the realm of typical BI vendors. “Rather than leaving [organizations’ own] dashboards, we can embed Arria technology directly into the platform of your choice so you can go to the next level of your data,” Daniels said. Parallel to this benefit is the advantage that organizations can amalgamate all of their insights in a single place, which contains the added benefit of explaining analytics results with NLG.

DevOps

Accessing NLG through APIs or SDKs is immensely useful for DevOps teams, particularly those tasked with supplying organizations the power of NLG. Instead of recreating the work of leading vendors in this space themselves, these team members can now leverage that work to drastically reduce the time and effort of implementations. “Developers that would typically have to go out, build an integration, design an interface, basically, we’ve packaged that up to enable the inclusion of added value via natural language into the dashboard very quickly,” Daniels observed. “That’s what we specialize in, so we’d like to say rather than a developer that wants to add NLG having to go through not only the time to market and development time to develop and then bring to market, he can quickly use our integration SDK and have Arria NLG inside to further enhance an existing product.”

Developers choosing to avail themselves of this opportunity for facilitating NLG gain access to libraries with plentiful amounts of code for implementing this technology. Furthermore, this code is imbued with several years of expertise and experience in providing NLG solutions. These resources are invaluable for accessing this technology through all the phases of the development lifecycle—from scoping out requirements to developing, testing, and deploying solutions. “It’s a kit that allows any developer to integrate Arria very quickly and with confidence because it’s proven,” Daniels mentioned.

Workplace Automation and Beyond

The ease with which developers can equip organizations with NLG by accessing it via APIs or SDKs may be influential to increasing the adoption rates of this cognitive computing dimension. Doing so could very well prove imperative since “wherever there’s data, there’s a potential to turn the data into written narratives,” Daniels indicated. “Our value proposition is speed to understanding and actionable decision-making, but ultimately communicating the information across the information.”

To that end, integrating NLG in any setting can positively impact the management of workflows such as report generation. NLG helps to automate these business processes and any host of others.