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Message-ID: <50C73BED.50406@swiftkey.net>
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:58:05 +0000
From: Matthew Willson <matthew@swiftkey.net>
Reply-To: Paul Butcher <paul@swiftkey.net>
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To: general@lucene.apache.org
CC: Paul Butcher <paul@swiftkey.net>
Subject: Advice/consulting from Lucene community on NLP-heavy search
 applications
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Hi all

At Swiftkey we've developed a lot of expertise in language modelling in 
the course of developing predictive text entry products. We're now 
increasingly looking to solve information retrieval problems using 
related techniques, and have identified Lucene 4 as a potential basis 
for this work.

Ours aren't standard web search applications though. We face some
interesting challenges in incorporating NLP techniques into a scalable 
search architecture, and from our work so far it's clear that a fair 
amount of custom development will be necessary on top of Lucene. So 
we're reaching out for advice -- to help us avoid engineering pitfalls, 
speed up our understanding of relevant Lucene internals and extension 
points, and to ensure we make the best use of existing work in the 
Lucene ecosystem.

For the right person this is something we're happy to pay for, either as 
commercial support, a consulting gig or potentially a full-time role out 
of our London office surrounded by a great engineering team full of NLP 
experts.

We're also keen to give back to the Lucene community and open to 
discussion around open-sourcing some of the results of our work, 
potentially sponsoring specific pieces of feature development where we 
can identify a piece of work which fits into the community roadmap.

Do get in touch with paul@swiftkey.net if this sounds interesting to 
you, or anyone else you know!

Cheers,

-Matthew