MTC Soft, Small Spanish Firm, Keeps Fast Company at the World Wide Web Conference 2009 in Madrid, Spain
Madrid, Monday, April 27, 2009—Like the mouse that roared, MTC Soft, a small software company from Granada, Spain, caused a stir at the 18th annual World Wide Web Conference 2009 in Madrid last week, holding its own among researchers from universities from all over the world as well as a bevy of Web heavyweights, including experts from companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
“There were moments when I found myself asking, ‘What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this,’” confesses Fernando Moreno-Torres, CEO of MTC Soft, “especially when I was on my way up to the podium for my presentation and I recognized Tim Berners Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, in the audience.” Moreno-Torres’s paper was selected among almost 100 proposals submitted by software developers from all over the world for the Developers’ Track of this conference which took place in Madrid last week (April 20-24).
In his presentation on Thursday afternoon Moreno-Torres introduced Parsalyzer, MTC Soft’s new product, which the young Spanish company chief affirms could drive the next great leap in Internet searches. “Until now,” says Moreno-Torres, “searches have been executed on “plain text,” with no linguistic differentiation among words. Parsalyzer automatically performs a complete linguistic analysis consisting of 140 separate processes on a text, then labels every word with its characteristics and function within the sentences. This “enriched text” permits a search motor to return dramatically improved search results, on the order of a 95% improvement.”
Moreno-Torres’s presentation on Thursday afternoon saw standing room only in the conference room. So much so, affirms Moreno-Torres, that two researchers from Google’s European laboratory in Switzerland found themselves sitting on the floor in the first row.
The most gratifying moment, according to Moreno-Torres, occurred at the dinner that night, when he coincided with Don José Alberto Jaén, full professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Madrid´s Polytechnique University, who had sat in the first row of seats during the Parsalyzer presentation. At one moment in their conversation the young man from MTC Soft asked the professor: “Do you believe what I affirmed in my talk this afternoon that we have created a tool which will substantially improve Internet searches and might well be a new standard for the World Wide Web?”
“Yes, I believe it,” replied the veteran professor.
