Malaikannan Sankarasubbu, VP of AI Research at Saama, spoke at BioData West 2018 held in San Francisco in March on Natural Language Understanding.

1. Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Delivering Analytics Advantage
to the Global 2000
Natural Language Understanding
By Malaikannan Sankarasubbu
Artificial Intelligence

2. 2
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
$whoami
• I am Malaikannan Sankarasubbu , VP of AI Research @Saama
Technologies. Previously Founder & CTO of datalog.ai a San
Francisco based startup.
• Connect with me
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malaikannan/
Twitter: @malai_san
Email: malaikannan.sankarasubbu@saama.com
Blog: malaikannan.io

3. 3
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
What Do I Do Now ?

4. 4
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Artificial Intelligence
Perception Understanding Reasoning

5. 5
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Pharma Has a Bigger Text Problem
27 Million Articles 267,732

6. 6
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
NLU -- Extracting Structured Data from Unstructured Text
Tom Smith who has been living in 123 Piscataway, Durham, NC has been
suffering from migraines for the past 3 years. He was admitted to hospital
previous on 08/01/2017 since Mr Tom broke his hand. He can be reached in
his office number 5555557777. He has been taking Vioxx for extended period
of time.
Name Address
Admission Date Phone
Seems relatively EASY
Huh !

7. 7
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Too Many Variations

8. 8
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Computers are really good at
crunching numbers.
They don’t understand text.

9. 9
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Adverse Drug Event Extraction

10. 10
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Can You Converse With Your Data ?

11. 11
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Christmas Gifts?

12. 12
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
UX CX
Impersonal Dashboard to Personalized Analytics

13. 13
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
You Need a Good NLU Engine!!!!
Intent Extractor
Understand what the user
means!!!
“What was Saama’s
revenue in 2017 ?”
Intent: revenue
Entity Extractor
Extract entities to make an
action!!
“What was Saama’s revenue
in 2017 ?”
Company: Saama
Year: 2017

14. 14
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Conversational Experience
One question one answer system is not good CX
They should have ability to hold conversation
Users respond with please and thank you after 6 responses

15. 15
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Where are you in the conversation?
What have you said before?
Conversation State

16. 16
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
How are we Solving It ?
Directed Acyclic Graph

17. 17
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Build a Virtual Assistant like you use Visio

18. 18
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
NLU engine generalizes well with ~20 samples per Intent
Customized NLU Engine for Pharma and Non-Pharma

19. 19
Copyright © 2018, Saama Technologies
Visit us at booth 12
Visit us at www.saama.com
Questions