NLP/NER: First views

So recently we have really been struggling at work with NLP/tags/phrases relating to a specific person/phrase. For example, you put down something like “Maltego” and you would like it to return things like the company (Paterva),  Information mining, Open source forensics, etc etc

So i started looking around for NER/NLP API’s online and i found a great writeup by Michael Fagan , anyway after looking at it i figured i’d take a few hours and build something around it. I decided to look at AlchemyAPI , registered an account got an API key and was well on my way.

Initially i started doing all the CURL+POST stuff myself (some of the API calls can be done with GET’s as well, check the bottom of each documentation page), but then i found they had already got libs for most languages (c++,php,c#,etc) that i could use – yeah.. fucking fail andrew.. next time read the site :)

So far the results aren’t amazing (get say Maltego or Paterva) as a person, but they are pretty decent, it definitely works a lot better on news sources (cnn.com,news24.com, and so on), heres a little demo of it for those that are interested, can’t guarantee it will be around for ever, but feel free to give it a go:

http://www.andrewmohawk.com/AlchemyTest/