School of Public Policy, a postgraduate school that is part of NUS. Findings from this project will help researchers to understand why citizens of different countries vote the way they do and to explain the rise of populist leaders in recent years.

 

UKDW students will be using the algorithms to help with their research, and Lexikat has also received indications of interest from 17 other universities in seven countries, to help their students and researchers conduct literature reviews and data analysis projects. Lexikat aims to use the feedback from university users to develop a commercial version of the software to serve the market research, customer relationship management (CRM), insurance services and financial sectors.

 

The new text analysis system that Lexikat has developed is currently being piloted by a group of free users. It was designed by researchers at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and has already been used to complete several large-scale opinion research projects in Singapore and abroad where text in English, Chinese and Japanese was analysed for public and private organisations, including the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, the Motion Picture Distributors Association and King’s College London. The system lets analysts process open-ended surveys and social media data as quickly as multiple-choice questionnaires (MCQs), providing more accurate and more nuanced results than conventional MCQ surveys at a comparable price.

 

With support from NUS, particularly from its Graduate Research Innovation Programme (NUS GRIP) and Lean Launchpad Singapore (LLP), Lexikat has already begun setting up a team incubating at BLOCK71 Yogyakarta. BLOCK71 is an initiative by NUS Enterprise that forms part of a global network of innovation and entrepreneurial gateways to and from NUS. The team will be working with UKDW researchers to develop a suite of NLP resources that will help researchers analyse texts in Bahasa Indonesia. Currently, Lexikat’s technology can analyse written text in the English and Chinese languages, and produce word clouds, statistics and graphs to help users quickly interpret large volumes of text. The company is currently working to integrate speech-to-text and auto-summary features, as well as additional visualisation options. 

 

UKDW has a strong background in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and computational linguistics, being the home of the TRAWACA Digital Humanities programme, which is known for its expertise in optical character recognition (OCR) and computational linguistics, and is a key member of the Indonesian Digital Heritage Group. The TRAWACA project works to scan and transliterate classical Javanese texts, and convert them to the Latin alphabet. UKDW also has a very strong machine learning and NLP teaching programme, producing graduates with all the skills necessary to tackle cutting-edge software development.

 

Lexikat CEO, Jennifer Dodgson, said, “We already have English and Chinese NLP tools available online, and we’re really looking forward to getting our Bahasa Indonesia toolkit ready for distribution. Indonesia is a huge emerging market, yet companies are limited by a lack of effective analytics options for the market research they can conduct in the country. With the help of our Bahasa Indonesia software, they can overcome language barriers and access even more potential business opportunities. We’re really looking forward to working with the experts at UKDW to get our software online. We have also been working on a more advanced AI that we hope to use in future projects.”