Need superhuman document review?

The Problem

Every day, companies sign off on documents that contain errors, ambiguities and confusing language that lead to inefficiency, rework and in some cases liability. The larger and more complex the project and the more safety, financial or data critical the project is, the bigger these downstream problems turn out to be.

Despite improvements in document review processes, unaided humans miss many problematic structures in text and fail to see how important words and terms can be misconstrued by readers with different frames of reference. Text review is time-consuming and tedious and it's hard to motivate people to do it uniformly well.

Simply put, writing is hard and text review is boring.

Show me a better way!

The Solution

There is a better way. Linguistic research has identified patterns in language associated with the potential for miscomprehension. We have developed methods to process text in an automated way to find these patterns and then to assess their likelihood of contributing to misunderstanding.

We can display these risk factors to the author or reviewer within the text itself and provide methods to fix the identified problems in the language on the spot. Further, we have built a curriculum called English4Engineers that educates writers through the correction of their writing, which can eventually replace costly, disruptive and often ineffective training courses.

By fixing errors at their root, our solutions save time, money and even lives.

How does it work?

The Products

We are building a suite of related products to solve difficult language problems that impact the fidelity of high-value documents.

Vital Text Analytics System

VTAS is a series of processes that identify and quantify risky language.

Ontological Management System

OMS identifies, stores and explicates important words and terms.

Comprehension Quality Index

CQI is a metric for writers and managers to assess the effectiveness of text.

English4Engineers

E4E teaches good writing practices through clear and immediately relevant examples.

Is that all?

The Services

Each of our enterprise-level tools started as a way of helping our in-house analysts do their jobs better. We call this superhuman augmentation.

Natural language analysis, particularly on the syntactic and semantic levels on which we work, is among the most difficult problems in computing. Our analysts and crowd workers contribute valuable human judgment to our processes.

We perform custom text analysis services and consulting directly for companies. We also provide training classes and materials for your writers and analysts.

Want to see what Vital Text can do for you? Contact us to arrange for a complimentary document risk analysis.

Who's behind this?

The Team



Gordon Monk

CEO

Gordon has 30 years experience managing software teams. He is an expert in agile and plan driven systems and has trained many teams on effective requirements engineering techniques. This is his fifth startup.


Wayne Cowart, PhD

Chief Linguist

Wayne is the chair of the linguistics department at University of Southern Maine. He specializes in the psychological aspects of language and is the author of the English4Engineers curriculum.

How do I get in touch?

Contact Us

Vital Text Systems

148 Middle St.
Portland ME 04101

(207) 619-0729
inquiries@vitaltextsystems.com

3 minute video

Vital Text Systems Super Human Text Review
from Gordon Monk on Vimeo.