XPDL is short for Extended Pattern Definition Language. It is a feature of Megaputer’s PolyAnalyst software that helps in analyzing textual data.
Megaputer periodically provides educational events to help others learn about our technologies.
Registration for the XPDL webinar series opens June 1, 2018.
Following numerous requests from our customers for more XPDL training material, I’ve been developing an XPDL seminar series. We receive a lot of questions about how best to use XPDL to extract information from text, because it is such an important task for text analysis. Data analysts, survey conductors, customer experience managers… anyone working with text data needs a way to extract the information they need. After testing these presentations on some of our analysts, we’ll begin preparing brand-new training modules for our customers.
This week, we had a lot of great questions from our analysts, making sure they understand the more complex rule types. Practicing the series at our weekly meetings has given us a lot of great tips and improvements— for example, we learned that users want lots of practical text examples, showing exactly the effect of the rule we’re learning about. We’ve also had some really positive feedback; after our Hierarchical Rules seminar, where we learned about how to make our XPDL rules as efficient as possible, one analyst team returned to their project and concentrated on applying the tips we covered. When they reported back, one of their Entity Extraction nodes had gone from 90-minute execution times to completing extractions in only 10 minutes. Now that’s progress!
There is a lot to learn—XPDL can be intimidating for new users, because there is so much customizability. You can use it to extract anything you want, based on word proximity or morphological, syntactic, and semantic context. This is a really exciting project because we will finally have discrete training modules on virtually any topic in XPDL, from syntax basics to the most advanced filtering and efficiency-improving techniques.
For those of you eager for training in XPDL right now, I plan to run a webinar series to make this content available to our customers. We will cover such topics as advanced PDL querying, XPDL syntax, improving efficiency with child rules, controlling your output, and tips and tricks to automating entity discovery.
Our presenters have also been developing quizzes for each of the topics, to accompany our PolyAnalyst certification program. Users can learn about specific topics in PolyAnalyst, prove their knowledge, and become experts in the myriad of applications of this software. Additionally, there will be hands-on workshop sessions available, as well as training videos and tutorials, to meet the needs of every user hoping to learn more about XPDL. The more our users and analysts know about XPDL, the more places they find to creatively solve interesting problems -I can’t wait to see what our network of analysts and data scientists comes up with next!
First stop, XPDL. Up next, everything else! XPDL is one of our most in-demand training topics, but there are many others, like Dictionaries, Document Classification, and Machine Learning. This is the start of an initiative that will set our trainers’ pockets to bursting with material to answer any question in a way that is easy to understand and straightforward to practice. We in Bloomington are already preparing hands-on workshops for a number of these topics—check out our conference agenda here.