Background
Natural language processing (NLP) is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) sub-field. By being able to detect, understand and respond to the natural language that people use in spoken or written form, NLP applications can help companies improve or even rethink how they support customers.
Like many industrial sectors, financial services have a language all of their own. For that reason, companies like Fidelity cannot simply use off-the-shelf NLP products for their applications. Instead, companies must build bespoke solutions that require novel machine-learning NLP approaches and specialised expertise to understand the unique terminology and regulatory requirements of the financial services domain. As a research leader in the field of natural language processing, Insight was perfectly placed to support Fidelity in this area. In 2018, Insight and Fidelity began a collaborative partnership that continues to this day.
Topics covered under this partnership include:
- Exploring the use of AR/VR/Metaverse for enterprise data
- Reinforcement Learning Models for Chatbots
- Knowledge Graph Enrichment in an Enterprise-ready Knowledge Infrastructure
- Language Model Development for Inclusive language detection
- Bias detection in AI
- Computer Vision for Image analysis for financial services regulation
Outcome
Key outputs from this multi-project collaboration have included patents, publications, proof of concepts, master classes, technical knowledge transfer and graduate recruitment.
As part of our ongoing collaboration with Fidelity Investments, one program of work centres on the development and application of Saffron (an Insight developed open-source software tool for knowledge graph extraction) for the automatic extraction of enterprise knowledge graphs in the financial domain.
Insight and Fidelity have received significant international and national press coverage of their collaborative outputs and were awarded “top 3 paper” at the 2019 International Semantic Conference (SEMANTICS) for joint Fidelity/Insight publication: “Taxonomy extraction for customer service knowledge base construction”
Impact
A collaborative research agenda covering key areas of technological and business opportunity for Fidelity and Insight has been explored. The scale of the initial engagement has been expanded to develop multiple projects with various Fidelity work groups. Research outputs have led to the deployment and implementation of new Fidelity products. Fidelity has gained access to state-of-the-art research that serves to improve how it supports its customers.
The collaboration has led to an array of tangential enterprise benefits. For example, “it can help big organisations from being bound by an enterprise mindset”, as espoused by Fintan O’Malley, former Director of Research, Development and Innovation at Fidelity Investments Ireland. “When you bring researchers and academics into the conversation, they help open up conversations to a lot more possibilities,” O’Malley said. “You may start a project with one specific objective and realise that there is much more possible here by drawing from the ‘state of the art’ in academic research. It’s not absolutely prescribed from beginning to end, and that’s the beauty of it.”
For further information about this collaboration please see the news items below: