
Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces - patelajay285
Hi, this is Ajay and Alex, and we’re the founders of Plasticity (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plasticity.ai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plasticity.ai&#x2F;</a>). We&#x27;re building an API that helps developers create human-like natural language interfaces.<p>Four years ago, we hacked 3rd party commands into Siri without jailbreaking before Alexa Skills or SiriKit were released (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;googolplex&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;googolplex&#x2F;</a>). It was the first App Store for voice commands. Since then, we’ve worked on NL interfaces at Google and Apple Siri. Now we&#x27;re tackling the next problem: products using NLP are fairly simplistic in what they can do for users. For example, systems like Siri still struggle to directly answer a basic question like &quot;When is the Y Combinator application due?&quot; because it can&#x27;t understand and reason where the answer may lie in a sentence on Y Combinator&#x27;s website.<p>We’re approaching the problem differently by understanding the structure of language and relationships within text, instead of relying on more simplistic methods like keyword matching. We build a graph of entities and their relationships within a sentence along with other linguistic information. You can think of it as “Open Information Extraction” with a lot more information (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plasticity.ai&#x2F;api&#x2F;demo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plasticity.ai&#x2F;api&#x2F;demo</a>).<p>Currently, we use a TensorFlow model to perform classical tasks like parts of speech, tokenization, and syntax dependency trees. We built our own Wikipedia crawler for data to better handle chunking and disambiguation, which helps return more accurate results for multi-word entities in sentences like: &quot;The band played let it be by the beatles.&quot; We wrote our open IE algorithms from scratch, focusing on speed. It&#x27;s written completely in C++ and we are adding more features everyday.<p>Our public APIs are in beta right now, we’re constantly working to improve the accuracy, and we’re looking forward to hearing feedback. We’d love to hear what the HN community is working on with NLP and how we can help!
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elil17
I'm impressed with Cortex - All industry leaders (Google, Siri, Alexa) answer
"Who killed John Wilkes Booth" with "Abraham Lincoln," but this gives the
correct answer. It shows that it has a deeper understanding of it's data
sources.

~~~
visarga
I asked "What is taller, a dog or a giraffe?" and it didn't know. Common sense
is not yet in the knowledge graph. Maybe it can't perform comparisons

Also: "What is the largest city in Europe?" -> "New York City".

"What is the largest city in the world?" -> "Gotham City"

So it seems to make KB lookup errors and probably can't do logic/set
operations.

~~~
acsands13
Correct, we can't do logic/set operations yet, but we can handle some graph
traversal questions where the answer is the property of a n-off related entity
like: (1) "Who is Arya Stark's father's wife?" or (2) "Mark Zuckerberg's
wife's birthday"

~~~
ORioN63
I also tried things like:

How old is the French Prime-Minister? How old is the Portuguese President?

President always defaults to Trump and Prime-Minister to May (May also
responds with two different results even though it show the same
text(/source?). Also in Sapien "Prime-Minister" wasn't recognized.

I'm very excited about technologies like this one.

~~~
patelajay285
Yes, this is definitely a class of questions we don't do right now, but have
updates coming for soon!

Good catch on "Prime-Minister", we will patch that.

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jtraffic
Something I'll keep my eye on, for sure. In the meantime:

It feels like you've reinvented much by writing stuff from scratch. spaCy is
fast, has tons of features, commonly updated, free, trained on the Common
Crawl corpus. Why not just use that? I'm only curious, not critical.

~~~
patelajay285
Thanks!

Fair question, we think spaCy is great, but it just made a lot of sense for us
to start on the basics so that we could modify things as needed. For example,
our tokenization algorithm and syntax dependency tree algorithm treats "let it
be" in "The band played let it be by the beatles." as a single chunk to return
a more accurate syntax dependency tree, which Google Cloud NL and spaCy don't
do out of the box today.

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crgt
This passage (from another one of the articles on top of HN right now
([https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null#tpw)](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null#tpw\)))
generates an error when trying to use the Sapien demo: "As a technology
journalist, being a Null has served me rather well. (John Dvorak, you know
what I’m talking about!) The geek connotations provide a bit of instant nerd
cred—to the point where more than one person has accused me of using a nom de
plume to make me seem like a bigger nerd than I am.

But there’s a dark side to being a Null, and you coders out there are way
ahead of me on this. For those of you unwise in the ways of programming, the
problem is that “null” is one of those famously “reserved” text strings in
many programming languages. Making matters worse is that software programs
frequently use “null” specifically to ensure that a data field is not empty,
so it’s often rejected as input in a web form."

Maybe it's the use of the word `Null`? Not sure, but love what you're doing
and thought I'd let you know about this.

~~~
patelajay285
Uh-oh, looks like it's the non-ASCII characters that are crashing our
interface. We'll fix this. Thanks for bringing it to our attention and the
kind comment!

~~~
crgt
Of course! I love these launch posts, they are one of my favorite parts of HN.
One other question for you, sparked in part by your response - any plans on
your roadmap to support any other (non-Western?) languages for any of the
APIs? Chinese, perhaps?

~~~
patelajay285
We've done some experimental work with other languages (specifically Chinese).
We think the Cortex Knowledge Graph API will do well when moved into other
language domains, but the Sapien Language Engine will likely require full-
rewrites of its core code for non-Romance languages.

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zitterbewegung
This is really cool. Website design is killer and looks beautiful. I tried
"Who married the 51st president?" which didn't work but when I tried "Who
married Barack Obama?" it responded correctly.

I then tried "Who married the president?" and got the correct responses also.

The only thing I would change is at the bottom of the Plasticity demo you
should have a big sign up button. And a link to your documentation.

~~~
bobbylox
Obama was the 44th (really 43rd if you count by people instead of
presidencies) President.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Those queries don't work either.

~~~
patelajay285
You're right, it's on the roadmap for Cortex along with: 1) ordered queries
("Who is the 44th president?") 2) comparison queries ("Is Bill Gates older
than Steve Ballmer?") 3) simple logic queries (AND/OR) 4) reducing overfitting
(the system's tendency to respond with any answer even though it may not have
an accurate one)

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gurut
What would a good non-commercial use case of this product be like? Would it
help simplify/understand Terms & Conditions better? Text summarization?

~~~
patelajay285
Great question!

Text simplification and summarization are great places this technology can be
deployed for non-commercial usage. One example is
[https://newsela.com](https://newsela.com) which provides articles on many
different subjects at various reading levels for kids in school. For example,
you can adjust the reading level on an article like this:

[https://newsela.com/read/lib-convo-europe-invasion-
dna/id/33...](https://newsela.com/read/lib-convo-europe-invasion-
dna/id/33802/)

Currently, this process is manual. But, our APIs could be used to help
automate things like this in the near future. Quick reminder that our APIs are
free for open-source or educational purposes. So, if anyone's interested in
giving this a go for a hackathon project, you can e-mail me at
ajay@plasticity.ai

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anathema-device
Very interesting. Needs to account for things like low literacy in certain
areas. Medical literacy is a big gap for a lot of people. Asked "What is
myocardial infarction? Correct article returned. Asked "What is myocardial
infraction?" Got article for Civil infraction. "What is hyperkalemia?"
returned a result. "What is high potassium?" No result.

~~~
patelajay285
Thanks for trying it out. We're not intending for it to be extremely domain
specific at this point, but as we add more data sources our coverage will get
better.

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int64
Will the document summarization API summarize and rewrite the content or just
a summary of the original content without a rewrite?

~~~
patelajay285
Yes, it will perform abstractive summarization (re-writing the language in the
text) vs. just extractive summarization, which just pulls out high-importance
sentences from text.

But we'll offer both just in case.

~~~
jbardnz
I have been looking for an abstractive summarization API for quite some time,
any idea when you will be releasing this. If you are planning any sort of beta
I would love to be part of it :)

~~~
patelajay285
Sign up for a developer account to stay updated and shoot me an email at
ajay@plasticity.ai if you'd be interested in sharing your use case, we'd love
to learn more.

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fiatjaf
"We're make sense of dark data to help companies in technology, law, medicine,
and government extract information from text."

Ignore the grammar error, you're helping government extract information from
text? Where exactly? Do you mean the NSA? Do you mean helping the government
look at public internet written commentary to track citizens?

~~~
patelajay285
Thanks for catching that!

We don't do anything like that, in fact, we don't work with the government at
all right now. We know that there is a huge application of this technology in
the government beyond the Department of Defense. For example, large corpuses
of text data other government agencies might need to process like the Census
Bureau, the IRS, etc.

~~~
fiatjaf
That's evil. I'll hate you if you help the IRS.

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alttab
How is this like, or better than Evi, which has origins in 2007 and is now
part of Alexa according to wikipedia?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_\(software\))

~~~
patelajay285
Good question! We mentioned this in another comment, but a lot of the comments
on this thread are about our Cortex Knowledge Graph API, but we actually think
of the Sapien Language Engine API as our main product.

We think being able to understand the semantic meaning behind language through
our graph of relationships and entities in a sentence are going to be critical
in building more robust conversational interfaces. So companies we are talking
to now include companies who want to use it for natural language search or
messaging apps.

Of course, we think the knowledge graph is useful as well in democratizing the
technology since WolframAlpha is absurdly expensive ($25-50 CPM) and the
Google KnowledgeGraph API is limited to 100,000 queries a day with no option
to pay for more and doesn't handle natural language question answering.

~~~
alttab
Got it. So really, its a piece of what Evi did, but you are making that a
service.

It will be interesting to see how other people apply this without competing
with Google, Amazon, or Apple directly.

~~~
patelajay285
Yes, exactly, we think there are a range of applications that will need this
kind of common sense information on-hand in the not too distant future.

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deegles
Are you planning on building any Natural Language Generation API's? Would love
to be able to submit a set of data points and receive a sentence.

~~~
patelajay285
Thanks for the question. Yes, we are! Signup as a developer and you will be
notified when we release them. We'd also love to understand your use case so
drop me a line at ajay@plasticity.ai if you're interested in talking.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
Can the lingua component of this (when it is available) be used to answer
questions from my own text corpus?

~~~
acsands13
Answering questions from your own text corpus will soon be part of Cortex!
It's actually the next thing we are working on. If you'd like, we can let you
know when it's ready. Just send me a message at alex@plasticityai.com with
your email and we'll reach out.

------
joering2
Cool. But i wonder what is a use-case for such technology. What kind of market
do you target?

~~~
patelajay285
A lot of the comments on this thread are about our Cortex Knowledge Graph API,
but we actually think of the Sapien Language Engine API as our main product.

We think being able to understand the semantic meaning behind language through
our graph of relationships and entities in a sentence are going to be critical
in building more robust conversational interfaces. So companies we are talking
to now include companies who want to use it for natural language search or
messaging apps.

