Commercial Impact of VLC Research

Ten years ago, large corpora were mainly available to industrial research groups; academic access to very large bodies of text was limited. Today a nllmber of large corpora are available and research using these resources has expanded well beyond the relatively small industrial research community. This expanded research community has significantly enlarged the scope of VLC research. Today's research results are enabling new products and are leading to fundamental changes in the business models of traditional publishers and online service providers. In this talk I identify areas of research that are likely to have significant commercial impact either because they enable new products or because they change the traditional economics of information delivery. I illustrate the impact that this research can have with a case study describing the development of KeyCite, a new citator product that would not have been possible without current generation text extraction and classification techniques.