Technology Commercialization Opportunity

PERILOG - Contextual Search and Retrieval Software Tools

Objective

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration seeks companies to commercialize Perilog. Perilog is a suite of data mining tools that retrieves and organizes contextually relevant data from any sequence of terms (text, musical notes, genetic data, etc.). It is an integrated set of methods that can be used to intelligently mine information from databases.

Product Profile

Perilog unearths data that is contextually relevant to the subject being investigated. The software measures the degree of contextual association for large numbers of term pairs in text (or any other sequence) to produce models that capture the structure of the text. Perilog statistically compares these models to measure their degree of similarity to a query model, develops a ranking, and presents the search results to the user. Furthermore, the user has access to powerful query tools that, for example, generate search options automatically.

Perilog was originally designed to support the FAA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). The ASRS testbed demonstrated Perilog’s power on a topical database of thousands of documents: The algorithm was powerful enough to produce the first quantitative evidence of situational relationships between reported commercial aviation incidents and a specific type of aviation accident (McGreevy & Statler, 1998).

Technical Basics

Perilog relies on four methods for data mining: 

• Keyword-in-Context Search retrieves narratives that contain one or more user-specified keywords in typical or selected contexts, and ranks the narratives on their relevance to the keywords in context.
• Flexible, Model-Based Phrase Search retrieves narratives that contain one or more user-specified phrases, and ranks the narratives on their relevance to the phrases.
• Model-Based Phrase Generation produces a list of phrases from documents that contain a user-specified word or phrase.
• Narrative-Based Phrase Discovery finds phrases that are related to topics of interest by generating a list of narratives similar in meaning to the keyword or phrase query.

Perilog offers the following features: 

Analysis: 
Measures contextual associations within sequences

Relevance-ranking: 
Ranks collections of contexts on similarity to other collections of contexts.

Search: 
Provides more effective key term and phrase search.

Phrase mining: 
Helps users to know what phrases occur in a database, and discovers phrases that are contextually related to key terms or phrases.

Modeling: 
Represents contexts within sequences as pairwise inter-term contextual associations having quantified degrees of association.

1. Generates network representations of collections of contexts. 
2. Models represent contexts of both real-world and symbolic terms. 
3. The contextual scope of models is easy to manipulate.

Potential Commercial Uses

Perilog has applications in a multitude of fields. Any knowledge management application can benefit from the technology. Perilog’s manipulation of patterned or sequential symbols, data, items, objects, events, causes, time spans, actions, attributes, entities, relations and representations allows powerful search and mining of any type of information repository. Some examples include:

BIOTECH: Perilog may be employed in biotechnology to unearth contextually relevant information, data, representations, sequences, and patterns. It may also be used to mine and retrieve genetic and protein sequences, representations, and analogs.

MULTIMEDIA: Perilog may also be used to manipulate multimedia repositories for "smart" retrieval of sound, music, voice, audio data, audio encoding, and vocal encoding.

CORPORATE NETWORKS: In a corporate text-based repository environment, Perilog algorithms may be applied to any form of text; for example, narratives, reports, literature, patents, punctuation, messages, electronic mail, internet text, and website information and URLs.

Additionally, it processes linguistic patterns and grammatical tags. Perilog is able to streamline any large topical database, manage corporate-wide knowledge repository (extendable to nodes outside the corporation via network), and could be extended in the future to push information based on specific research, marketing, or organizational projects to querying users.

Benefits

Perilog has tangible benefits such as context-sensitivity and "smart" context ranking. It can distill topically and situationally relevant phrases and deliver relevant results to a user. Furthermore, Perilog does not require expert intervention to achieve results.

Technology Commercialization Status

Perilog consists of modules embodied in four patents (pending). NASA is seeking non-exclusive license applicants.

Contact

For more information about this technology, to inquire about licensing opportunities,  please contact:

David Lackner
Commercial Technology Office
NASA Ames Research Center
Phone: (650) 604-5761
Fax: (650) 604-1592

E-mail: dlackner@mail.arc.nasa.gov
Website: http://ettc.usc.edu/ames/perilog