Company History

Alias-i was founded by Breck Baldwin 1999 under the name Baldwin Language Technologies. The original funding source was a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) research grant under the Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) program.

In early 2002, Baldwin Language Technologies relocated to New York from Philadelphia and began doing business as Alias-i. The next two years brought continued DARPA and Department of Defense (DoD) funding, primarily to develop the ThreatTracker information extraction application for defense intelligence analysts.

How LingPipe got its Name

LingPipe was named after the concurrent version system (CVS) module in which it was first stored. The original version was a fairly straightforward XML-based pipeline for doing sentence detection, entity extraction, within-document coreference and then cross-document coreference.

In September 2003, LingPipe, the natural language processing application programmer interface (API) behind ThreatTracker was released under a dual royalty-free and commercial licensing scheme.

In 2004, Alias-i received a two-year Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), one of the National Insitutes of Health (NIH). The focus of the grant is extraction of biological entities in biomedical research literature. This grant funded the extensive biomedical natural language processing (NLP) tools and models now found in LingPipe. The Phase II SBIR application is currently being prepared.

LingPipe Customers

For a description of customer projects, see the:

In 2004 Alias-i began selling commercial licenses, with customers including WestLaw for query spelling checking, EdgarOnline for topic classification, Nielsen-Buzzmetrics for sentiment classification, and Technorati for Chinese/Japanese/Korean and Arabic search.

Staff

Breck Baldwin, President

Breck Baldwin received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1995 from the University of Pennsylvania. In the time between his influential thesis on coreference resolution and evaluation and founding Alias-i in 1999, Breck worked on DARPA-funded projects through UPenn.

Bob Carpenter, Software Architect

Bob Carpenter received his Ph.D. in cognitive and computer science in 1989 from the University of Edinburgh. Between 1988 and 1996, he was a post-doc through associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He worked in the multimedia communications research group at Bell Laboratories between 1996 and 2000, then at the speech-recognition startup SpeechWorks, between 2000 and joining Alias-i in early 2002.