Facebook confirms acquisition of London-based Bloomsbury AI

Facebook scoops up natural language processing start-up for up to $30m

Social media giant Facebook has confirmed its acquisition of London-based artificial intelligence start-up Bloomsbury AI.

The company, which has been backed by IQ Capital, the London Co-investment Fund and the UCL Technology Fund, among others, has been acquired for up to $30 million.

Bloomsbury AI focuses on natural language processing - developing machine reading methods that can understand written text across a broad range of domains.

"We've started off by building an AI that reads text documents and answers questions about their contents (called Cape). You can use Cape on your own documents or website, so that users of your knowledge can get immediate answers to their questions," claims the company on its website.

It continues: "We're going to use what we learn from this version to improve our AI, so that it can answer more questions - even ones that require elements of reasoning and synthesis. Eventually we want to be able to answer any question that requires reading better than a human."

The acquisition was confirmed by Facebook in a Facebook post.

"We're excited to announce that the team behind Bloomsbury AI has agreed to join Facebook in London. The Bloomsbury team has built a leading expertise in machine reading and understanding unstructured documents in natural language in order to answer any question.

"Their expertise will strengthen Facebook's efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications."

The acquisition and its staff will join a number of other artificial intelligence projects that Facebook is currently working on. These include a chip to power AI hardware and AI technology that can mimick how humans work.

Bloomsbury AI co-founder and head of research, Sebastian Riedel, co-founded Factmata, a startup that purports to have developed tools to help brands combat fake news, according to Tech Crunch.