Natural Language Processing

BCL Technologies offers various ways to communicate with desktop computers and handheld devices using linguistic interfaces for multiple languages - English, Arabic, Urdu-Hindi, and Korean. Majority of the traditional Natural Language-based systems cannot handle slight deviations from pre-defined sets of constructs, and therefore do not allow humans to communicate with machines naturally. BCL's Natural Language (NL) capabilities offer the freedom for users to communicate with voice-enabled handheld devices and desktop computers using natural languages with any number of variations in which a specific command or query may be stated. The applications BCL has developed or currently developing entail semantic annotation, word sense disambiguation, lexical summarization, text simplification, categorization, word sense disambiguation, and speech-based language learning tools.

BCL holds several patents pending in this area. Its research is published widely in refereed journals and peer-reviewed conferences. BCL has been granted a number of federally funded projects in the area of natural language processing in the last ten years.

Document Analysis and Recognition

BCL carries out research in all areas of document recognition and analysis. BCL's widely published research on document layout analysis has been incorporated in its award winning document conversion products. BCL is the world leader in providing PDF conversion tools. This product suit includes tools for converting PDF files to Word, PDF files to HTML, PDF files to RTF and PDF files to ASCII text. Research in DAR has resulted in two product suits, one comes in the form of Adobe Acrobat plugins, where the users need to have a copy of full Adobe Acrobat running in their machines. Second, this research has led to a product suit that is independent of adobe acrobat, but at the same time offers similar features.

BCL has been granted federally funded projects in the area of document analysis and recognition in the last ten years. It also has several patents in this area, either granted or pending.

Cross-Disciplined Research

BCL has been a leader in performing research in combining the two fields of document analysis and natural language processing. DAR and NLP have a history of close cooperation in developing products that span this divide. Some of the exciting research in this area include development of a natural language based search engines for web-based repositories, document summarization, email summarization, document classification, and web page classification.