Article #1
SOFTWARE CRUNCHES WORDS
Reprinted from the Provo Herald, May 12, 1997, Page B5
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Alpine, Utah - May 12, 1997: The license of a software program developed at BYU in 1982 and mainly used at the university for the past 15 years has recently been purchased by a local company.
WordCruncher Internet Technologies, founded by Dan Lunt and James Johnston, is already bursting at the seems of its Alpine office. The two have been working since November with WordCruncher's co-developer, Jim Rosenvall, who is on temporary leave from BYU while he trains the company's owners and staff to take over the software. Rosenvall was a programmer from BYU when he was hired by Monte Shelley to develop WordCruncher.
"WordCruncher is a software to act as an aid to scholars and students who are searching for text databases to find citations, quotes, etc.," Rosenvall explained. Anther software package, Folio, was developed at BYU at the same time as WordCruncher, each unknown to the other. But whereas Folio has more of a business-based clientele because its focus is on dynamic (changing) data such as legal documents, Rosenvall said, WordCruncher's Technology "takes advantage of static data - materials that don't change. Consequently, our search engine is very, very fast; a word or phrase can be found almost instantaneously."
Explaining how WordCruncher helps narrow frequently-used words. During a search by also identifying words around them (context), Rosenvall mentioned how an unsigned sonnet was "proved" to be Shakespeare's after WordCruncher was used to analyze the word patterns. ABC News carried the story worldwide a few months ago.
The Software is being used by FARMS (Foundation of Ancient Research and Mormon Studies) at BYU and by three major companies in Utah Valley, in addition to five other places around the world including a company in McLean,Va., which provides supporting technology to Arabic world.
"The thing that makesWordCruncher unique," said Rosenvall, " is our ability to deal with many languages. We may be the only software product in the world that can do retrieval from any language." WordCruncher licensees have used the software with Oriental and Middle Eastern languages. It has also been used with classical Greek and to assist scholars studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written in Hebrew.
The software is unique, said its co-developer, in that it can access not only individual languages in the same document. That includes the technical problems of inverting such language as Hebrew and Arabic, which read from right to left.
WordCruncher has also met the challenge of languages which use symbols. Compared with perhaps 250 in English, Chinese has a complex set of 3,000, with no spaces between the words. And a single Arabic verb with its prefixes and suffixes can take hundreds of forms. But WordCruncher handle such "agglutinized" languages. "It's one of the things we've worked hardest on," said Rosenvall.
Closer to home, Covenant Communications, based in American Fork, is one of the value-added retailers who bundle WordCruncher software with their product. Covenant's Ultimate LDS Library on CD-ROM boasts almost access to some 850 works at the stroke of a key. A Provo company, MultiLing, uses WordCruncher as it specializes in providing translation tools. WordCruncher has also helped the American Genealogy Lending Library (AGLL) in Bountiful manage its huge library that had more than a million listings beginning with a single "W" alone.
WCTI in Alpine, to whom BYU has turned over not only the license but the source of code and development ("a watershed," according to Rosenvall) is both a provider and a publisher. A new version of its library went online Friday (www.wordcruncher.com).
"Our next focus is getting publishing tools ready to ship," said Lunt, who has eight fulltime employees handling development and marketing. Lunt worked for WordPerfect for 13 years, the last 10 marketing and sales. He and his partner met a decade ago in Orem to propose a joint working relationship. They stayed in touch as Johnston was living in Indiana, and went into business together last fall.
WordCruncher has since been used for a wide variety of applications. They include protein analysis ( from a description of the different protein chains --- "the most unusual use of technology that I've ever heard of," said Rosevall) and school psychology, where troubled students' writings are analyzed and the basis of what words appear around certain other words such as "friend," "love," "hate," etc.
WCTI's Lunt told how Michael Lamonico, an AP English teacher in Long Island, N.Y., has used the software to teach Shakespearean literature to exited studentswho become experts on a chosen word, then find it in context and analyze its usage. "He's found it to be a very effective teaching tool for the classroom," said Lunt, adding that WCTI will offer an interactive classroom on the Web this month, taught by Lamonico.
In addition to classes on Websites, WCTI expects to announce a new technology that will allow the company to service the web by letting users access and will remote library sites, or purchase texts and load them on their own computer. "Our long-term goal," said Lunt, "is to have all textbooks (even school texts) available for reference so that a person with an account could log on and get access to a whole library or materials." |
