Two of the co-founders of Linguamatics, David Milward, left, and James Thomas.

A decade of knowledge discovery is being celebrated by Cambridge company Linguamatics as it marks its 10th anniversary.

The firm – based at St John’s Innovation Centre – is going from strength to strength, with its technology now used by nine of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies.

And it’s also proving popular with healthcare organisations, government, research institutes and academia.

Linguamatics enables organisations to maximise the value derived from information resources through effective deployment of innovative natural language processing (NLP)-based technology.

Users mine large collections of documents, extracting, analysing and synthesising relevant facts, relationships and quantitative data from content such as scientific papers, news feeds, patents or internal reports.

Linguamatics’ versatile semantic knowledge discovery system I2E was developed in-house by the original four founders, three of whom remain within the leadership team.

The technology helps organisations to do more than simply cope with vast quantities of information – its unique combination of search and text mining enables them to turn this information into a competitive advantage.

“We knew that language processing could get people relevant information much faster than traditional search methods,” said chief technology officer and co-founder David Milward.

“However, previous systems needed reprogramming for different questions. We wanted to give users the flexibility to extract any information they wanted.

The company’s goal is to provide ‘the text mining platform that you simply can’t afford to live without’.

Loyalty among its customers is strong, with licence renewals year on year running at 95 per cent of the customer base.

“We provide an exceptionally high level of customer service to very successful organisations, who expect the highest standards of professional and technical capability,” said chief operating officer and co-founder Roger Hale.

The software is backed by stringent quality processes. “We have to work hard to keep up with the range of demands for the product, which is challenging but exciting work,” said co-founder James Thomas, head of quality assurance.

“As a result, we find that we can attract some of the most highly qualified and experienced technical professionals in our market.”

Applications of the software range from research and development to commercial and competitive intelligence in life sciences and related fields. But the power of the text mining platform has far wider potential application.

Linguamatics has been funded by the UK Technology Strategy Board to demonstrate how ‘external chatter’ – such as Twitter and blogs – can provide early warning in near real time of economic or security problems.

The company has continued to grow, despite the economic downturn – and has opened an office in Boston in the US to deal with the growing number of customers in that region.

And it’s confident the next 10 years will continue the journey of discovery.