Genpact said that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded the company a patent for natural language understanding (NLU) that enables its artificial intelligence (AI) applications to understand the meaning of natural language, something not previously possible in the context of solving business problems. The technology is an integral part of the Genpact Cora AI-based platform for digital transformation.
The patent covers Genpact's technology method for understanding the meaning of a document using computational linguistics – similar to how a human brain creates and understands meaning – rather than relying on less accurate statistical methods.
Genpact said that this approach provides several advantages. First, it enables Genpact's AI applications to process natural language, while retaining the context. Most real-world AI solutions need to be contextual in order to be accurate and generate relevant outcomes. Second, the approach provides complete traceability into its reasoning, therefore avoiding the common “black box” problem in order to help users and system developers understand exactly how the AI system made its decision. Third, Genpact's technology enables AI-based solutions to be developed without requiring as large of a data set as other AI solutions for training, which facilitates faster time-to-value.
“Many natural language processing technologies today are ineffective when it comes to complex business documents because they miss the context and nuance in business language. Our NLU technology gets around this by applying more contextual understanding with a linguistics-based approach, in addition to a statistical approach,” said Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital officer, Genpact.
Company claimed that it has multiple use cases in production with clients that apply this patented technology. This includes the extraction of structured and unstructured data and turning that data into actionable knowledge. This is applied in multiple areas to drive transformation, including contract reconciliation with invoices, contact center service ticket analysis and optimization, financial statement aggregation for wealth management, and real-time interpretation of news and other content.
“This patent is another validation of our focus on the next frontier of solving business problems using NLU based on computational linguistics and continuous learning methods without relying on statistical methods,” said Srini Bharadwaj, head of Natural Language Understanding products, Genpact. “We have made great progress in driving innovation in several fundamental aspects of linguistics such as part of speech tagging and co-reference resolution, which enables us to perform at very high levels of accuracy with a nominal amount of expert assistance.”
