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Cognition's core technology, Cognition's Semantic NLPTM, is the outgrowth of ideas and development work which began over 23 years ago at IBM where Cognition's founder and CTO, Kathleen Dahlgren, Ph.D., led a research team to create the first prototype of a "natural language understanding system." In 1990, Dr. Dahlgren left IBM and formed a new company called Intelligent Text Processing (ITP). ITP applied for and won an innovative research grant with the Small Business Administration. This funding enabled the company to develop a commercial prototype of what would become Cognition's Semantic NLP. That work won a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award for excellence in 1995. In 1998, ITP was awarded a patent on a component of the technology. During this development period, ITP assembled a large research group of over 30 people, some of whom were lexicographers dedicated to building the huge computational English dictionary and semantic databases which are the underpinnings of the current technology. In addition, a core team of linguists was brought together to create a powerful research group, including Dr. Karen Wallace and Dr. Daniel Albro, both computational linguists. Unfortunately, ITP did not survive the dot-com meltdown and closed its doors in 2002. In 2004, a new company, Cognition Technologies, was formed by Dr. Dahlgren and her team which would carry on the legacy (and the technology development)1. Funded by angel investors, including the Southern California Tech Coast Angels, the Company has spent the past four years advancing the technology and launching a suite of commercialized applications and live demonstration sites. In January of 2006, Scott Jarus, former chief executive of j2 Global/eFax (NASDAQ: JCOM], joined the company both as an investor and CEO. His mission is to leverage the technology as the next evolution in Natural Language Processing capability, and to fully develop a successful technology licensing business. 1 Cognition Technologies was originally named MeaningMasterTM, and then Quester, before settling on its current name. In 1998, Cognition Technologies (through its predecessor company) was awarded a patent (#5,794,050) entitled, "A Natural Language Understanding System". This seminal patent includes 30 claims. The patent describes a linguistic method for controlling the explosion of potential parses (syntactic structures). Computational parsers slow unacceptably because they pursue all the paths in a maze of potential structures. This patent deploys common sense reasoning and "naive" semantics to avoid fruitless paths and back-tracking in the computational parser. It would prevent, for example, a computational parser from trying to build up a parse of "The woman on the rock cried", in which "the rock cried" is a sentence level part. It prevents this fruitless path by noticing that it is semantically implausible for a rock to cry. This invention cuts parsing time exponentially.

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