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Commercial Impact of VLC Research 
Howard Turtle 
Chief Scientist 
West Group 
turtle~research.westlaw.com 
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 commu- 
nity 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 commer- 
cial impact either because they enable new products or because they change the 
traditional economics of information delivery. I illustrate the impact that this re- 
search 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. 
