Met Office adds NLG weather forecasts to website

10 February 2014

Arria NLG plc

 ("Arria", the "Company" or the "Group")

The Met Office adds Natural Language Generation to its public website

Arria NLG plc (AIM: NLG), a leader in the development and deployment of Natural Language Generation ("NLG") technologies, announces that the Met Office is now offering Arria's NLG-generated weather forecast narratives on its Met Invent website. The forecasts, currently available for any of 5,000 geographic points in the United Kingdom, can be viewed at

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/forecast-data2text

Arria has been working closely with the Met Office since 2009 to utilize the power of Arria's NLG technologies to write on-demand, site-specific weather forecasts for use by the public. In a recent release on its Met Invent website, the Met Office added NLG-authored narratives to its 5-day forecasts, combining the familiar graphic presentation of weather data with NLG-authored narratives for the first time. Further expansion to provide NLG-authored forecasts for thousands or millions more specific sites in the UK and worldwide is envisioned. This greatly increased level of text forecasting granularity would be virtually impossible using human-authored forecasts.

The Arria and Met Office science teams continue to collaborate on the automation of weather reporting.

John Harrison, Head of Products of the Met Office, said, "Natural Language Generation is an opportunity for the Met Office to reach users with site-specific forecasts incorporating clear and simple narrative guidance on the weather in their immediate locale. NLG offers additional opportunities to improve the delivery of weather information through automated reporting. We encourage the public to try the 5-day forecast using automated narrative that is now available on our Met Invent website and provide us with feedback."

Stuart Rogers, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Arria NLG plc, commented that, "We are very pleased to be working with the UK's national weather service and its science team to write NLG-authored on-demand, site-specific weather forecasts. Natural Language Generation automates expert analysis and reporting not only in meteorology but in a variety of fields to make optimal use of Big Data."

Contacts:

Background

ARRIA NLG plc

Arria is a UK headquartered software development business. Its core product, the Arria NLG Engine, originated from research at the University of Aberdeen, a leading institution in the field of Natural Language Generation. Arria's target is to be the global leader in the development and deployment of mission critical, core industrial, enterprise level NLG software technologies.

Its technology is already deployed in a mission critical environment, monitoring large-scale industrial machinery located on oil and gas production platforms in deepwater Gulf of Mexico for a major global oil and gas company. It is also in use at the UK Met Office.

The Met Office

The Met Office is the UK's National Weather Service.

The Met Office is a Trading Fund within the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, operating on a commercial basis under set targets.

As a world leader in providing weather and climate services, the Met Office employ more than 1,800 at 60 locations throughout the world. The Met Office is recognised as one of the world's most accurate forecasters, using more than 10 million weather observations a day, an advanced atmospheric model and a high performance supercomputer to create 3,000 tailored forecasts and briefings a day. These are delivered to a huge range of customers from the Government, to businesses, the general public, armed forces, and other organisations.

This includes the Public Weather Service (PWS), which provides forecasts for the public to help them make informed decisions about their day-to-day activities. The National Severe Weather Warning Service is also a part of this, providing advance notice of weather which could affect public safety.