Human Inference

Human Inference believes it has found the right recipe for successful information retrieval. The ingredients? One part linguistic intelligence, another part world knowledge, and a healthy dose of organizational experience.

Intelligent Retrieval is the name of the comany’s product; it is a highly efficient, “smart” search routine designed to be implementated in large databases on mainframe and or larger minicomputer systems. A Dutch version has been on the market for some time now, a French version has just been released, and while German and English ones are onthe way.
    Director Jan Ahrends explains that “In a large adminstrative or order processing database, names, particulary of companies, can be misspelled, abbreviated, and otherwise mutilated in all kinds of ways. Your database might eventually have a lot of duplicates or, even worse, you might not be able to find a customer when you need to.”
    Human Inference has developed a series of sophisticated search algorithms which regularize names. It has a small dictionary of standard strings (titles, cities, rivers, etc.) and performs phonetic rather than literal searches. These together with other techniques make Intelligent Retrieval useful for some interesting applications, such as removing duplicate records from databases, converting uppercase only address lists from old mainframe systems to upper- and lowercase, and finding customer files in large databases without tears.
    Intelligent Retrieval was developed on the basis of experiences of Arends and fellow director Mergen while working for a large insurance company. At the time, a blacklist of auto insurance swindlers was regularly circulated among the insurance companies on microfilm.
Employees could check the list by searching on name, birthdate, or license plate number, but by simply entering a different year of birth or a slight variation in a name, chronic no-gooders could easily fool the system. Arends and Mergen developed a system which could detect minor discrepancies and return the culprit every time; they developed it further and now market it as Intelligent Retrieval.
    It is now used by a variety of large organizations, such as insurance companies, banks, and credit agencies. Human Inference is currently seeking marketing partners in other European countries for its systems.

Human Inference, Jansbuitensingel 7-8, 6811 AA Arnhem, The Netherlands; Tel. +31 85 511 711