North Side is a software company based in

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple ...

. It was founded in 2000, and over the years, the company has been developing

natural language understanding Natural-language understanding (NLU) or natural-language interpretation (NLI) is a subtopic of natural-language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. Natural-language understanding is considered an A ...

and

natural language generation Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that produces natural language output. In one of the most widely-cited survey of NLG methods, NLG is characterized as "the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics th ...

(together, dialogue) software since 2001.

History

The company was founded by Eugene Joseph in 2000, after his first company, Virtual Prototypes Inc., went public on the

Toronto Stock Exchange The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX; french: Bourse de Toronto) is a stock exchange located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the 10th largest exchange in the world and the third largest in North America based on market capitalization. Based in the ...

in July 1999; that company currently operates as Presagis, a subsidiary of CAE. In the early 2000s, North Side did R&D work funded in part by the Canadian Department of National Defence and

National Research Council National Research Council may refer to: * National Research Council (Canada), sponsoring research and development * National Research Council (Italy), scientific and technological research, Rome * National Research Council (United States), part of ...

and

Telefilm Canada Telefilm Canada is a Crown corporation reporting to Canada's federal government through the Minister of Canadian Heritage. Headquartered in Montreal, Telefilm provides services to the Canadian audiovisual industry with four regional offices in ...

. In 2007, North Side embarked on the development of '' Bot Colony'', the first video game making coherent English dialogue with the characters an integral part of gameplay. At its peak, in 2014, this team had 45 members. The game development was financed in part by the

Canada Media Fund The Canada Media Fund (CMF, french: Fonds des médias du Canada - FMC) is a public-private partnership founded on April 1, 2010 by the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canadian cable industry. It is used to fund the creation of original ...

and the first two episodes of Bot Colony were launched on Steam on June 17, 2014. The company claimed to have spent approximately $23 million on the project by its shutdown in 2015, of which around $20 million went towards R&D in natural language understanding.

Current activities

The company launched VerbalAccess at Finovate in New York City on September 16, 2015. VerbalAccess provides an English interface to financial services in English. VerbalAccess is intended to allow people to send transactions through speech, or via text-messages. The knowledge base of VerbalAccess spans financial services encompassing banking, credit cards, creditworthiness and loans, savings, and to a more limited extent, insurance and investments.

Technology

For ''Bot Colony'', North Side added a semantic reasoner to the natural language understanding pipeline, which is able to reason on

logical axioms An axiom, postulate, or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word (), meaning 'that which is thought worthy or f ...

expressed in English (the equivalent of

Prolog Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily ...

with predicates in English) and on formalized

procedural knowledge Procedural knowledge (also known as knowing-how, and sometimes referred to as practical knowledge, imperative knowledge, or performative knowledge) is the knowledge exercised in the performance of some task. Unlike descriptive knowledge (also kno ...

expressed in English. A key feature distinguishing North Side's technology from an

intelligent personal assistant An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. The term "chatbot" is sometimes used to refer to virtual ...

based on

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

, such as

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

Siri Siri ( ) is a virtual assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, and audioOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer qu ...

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

Now Now most commonly refers to the present time. Now, NOW, or The Now may also refer to: Organizations * Natal Organisation of Women, a South African women's organization * National Organization for Women, an American feminist organization * Now ...

, is its ability to clarify ambiguous or incomplete input and handle paraphrases, using a deterministic, rule-based approach. North Side relies on advances in parsing and disambiguation to understand language more precisely, making financial transactions through voice or text-messaging feasible.{{cite web , url=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC95056o1bfZ8tOUAKAblWXg , website=

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

, title=Verbal Access , author=North Side , accessdate=April 21, 2017 , type=videos The underlying database technology supporting North Side's NLU technology is the Versant Object Database from

Actian Actian is a computer software company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California that provides data management software. In July 2018, Actian was acquired by HCL Technologies and Sumeru Equity Partners for $330 million. On December 31, 2021, HCL Tec ...

References

External links

Official website
Organizations based in Montreal Organizations established in 2000 Natural language generation