AFCEA Intelligence Professionals Adopt New Paradigm for Information Analysis.

ROCHESTER, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 11, 1997

World's First Intelligent Text Retrieval System That Understands

Meaning the Way Humans Do Will Be Demonstrated at TechNet '97

Manning & Napier Information Services (MNIS), a pioneer in the development of data mining and information analytics, today announced the availability of DR-LINK(TM), its powerful intelligent text retrieval, extraction, and analysis system, to corporate and sustaining members of AFCEA, the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

The DR-LINK service, which lets corporate, government, and military intelligence professionals ask in-depth strategic questions in everyday language to find complex nuances of thought hidden in vast electronic reservoirs of information, will be demonstrated at TechNet '97, AFCEA's 51st International Convention and Exposition. TechNet '97, the premier showcase for the communications, electronic, intelligence, and information systems industry, will be held at the Washington, D.C. Convention Center from June 17-19, 1997.

The AFCEA Information Alert, which is being offered to AFCEA members for an attractive single-user price, provides unlimited searching of DR-LINK content through the World Wide Web. Upon request, AFCEA members may obtain a 30-day free trial subscription to the service. A demonstration of DR-LINK's query system may be viewed on AFCEAs web site at http://www.afcea.org/drlink.

"We are pleased to offer DR-LINK at a special contract rate to the AFCEA membership," Mike Weiner, chief executive officer of MNIS, said. "Ordinarily, a firm would have to sign up a large number of users to get an attractive single unit price. Our agreement with AFCEA is the first in a series with many leading trade and professional associations that brings the power of DR-LINK to the corporate desktop making it more easily affordable."

"DR-LINK's analytic capabilities will help AFCEA searchers identify and extract relevant information, make real-time decisions, and detect competitive trends and threats otherwise lost in a morass of information. Since DR-LINK is linguistically-based, processing and analyzing whole text on the same multiple levels that humans do, it represents a breakthrough in the way information is analyzed," said Weiner.

Originating with a government grant through TIPSTER, a program of the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA), DR-LINK's analytic natural language technology was developed by TextWise, Inc., founded in 1993 by Dr. Elizabeth Liddy of Syracuse University. MNIS was founded in 1995 to deliver DR-LINK and MAPIT(TM), a powerful patent data mining and analysis tool, to the business information market.

DR-LINK Capabilities

First used by the U.S. government intelligence community, DR-LINK technology is currently in use at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, and major corporations and intellectual property law firms throughout the country. Weiner believes that corporations trying to build competitive intelligence capabilities can learn a great deal from how government intelligence and defense communities have used DR-LINK technology to spot trends, predictions, and turnarounds. According to Weiner, traditional word-based text retrieval systems cannot identify predictions, evaluations, and consequence, or distinguish between past and present, the whole and its parts, and other related meanings that exist above the word and sentence level.

With DR-LINK, you can ask a question in plain English in a full sentence or paragraph as if you were talking to another person. No special phrasing or logical syntax is required. For example, you might ask: I want information about companies that are leaders in their respective market sector, are not profitable, or are marginally profitable, and are predicted to return to profitability and dominate their market segment.

This real-life information request prompts DR-LINK to separate statement from prediction, explain relationships, and eliminate ambiguity. The retrieved concepts often yield surprising results. "It's quite common to get more than what you asked for," Weiner remarked. "That's the beauty of DR-LINK. It will give you the potentially relevant area around the bull's eye, a critically important boundary of meaning that is inaccessible through traditional searching. The clarity and context that emerges from this added layer of human understanding is like the difference between DOS and Windows, or between the fuzzy blips on a radar screen and the wondrous images made visible through the Hubble telescope."

To help AFCEA members see the relevance of DR-LINK's search results, MNIS has created an automatic visual profiler for The AFCEA Information Alert that categorizes and relevance-ranks search results generated by pre-selected queries. Members may quickly identify articles of keen interest, or skip those that are of no personal interest. "This Information Alert is a valuable application for corporate intranets," said Weiner. "It can be used interactively within an organization, helping users to publish and share critical findings with their colleagues."

DR-LINK Content

As part of its offer to AFCEA members, DR-LINK provides access to UMI's leading Intell.X newsfeeds. Members may access a variety of vertical newsfeeds that cover the areas of computers, government, aerospace/defense, and telecommunications. Additional content is available beyond the core subscription offer, including thousands of leading sources of business, technical, and scientific information contained in IAC's PROMT(R) and ASAP(TM) databases, The Financial Times, INSPEC, NTIS, and MNIS's Computer, Software, and Technology Collection. AFCEA members whose companies already subscribe to DowVision (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, etc.), or to other newswires such as Financial Times, Reuters, or AFX, are entitled to substantial corporate discounts, and may use the DR-LINK technology to search these external news sources.

Demonstrations of DR-LINK may be viewed inside the AFCEA Pavilion at TechNet '97 and MNIS products will be on display at booth #2233. For more details, contact Manning & Napier Information Services at 1-800-278-5356, ext. 1, or 1-716-454-0050, ext. 1, or by e-mail at [e-mail]. Additional information about DR-LINK may be found on the MNIS web site at www.mnis.net, or on the AFCEA web site at www.afcea.org/drlink. Manning & Napier Information Services is associated with Manning & Napier Advisors, a leading Rochester-based investment management firm with more than $6 billion under management. TM a trademark of Manning & Napier Information Services. All other marks belong to their respective owners.

CONTACT: Stanton-Crenshaw Communications

Jennifer Gery, 212/727-3300

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