ARRIA NLG has highlighted the growing industry applications of its technology as annual results showed a narrowing of losses.

The company, which uses technology developed at Aberdeen University to translate data into readable text or simple to follow diagrams, saw its revenue dip from £816,000 to £787,000 in the 12 months to September 30.

That was mainly as a result of contract timings with its oil and gas client Shell although it saw an increase in revenue from the Met Office, where it helps to provide automatically generated weather forecasts.

For Shell the company's systems are deployed on offshore platforms in parts of the Americas.

On the Met Office it said: "Further expansion to provide NLG-authored forecasts for thousands or millions more specific sites in the UK and worldwide is possible.

"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."

Arria, which floated on the Alternative Investment Market on December 5 last year, narrowed its annual pre-tax losses from £13m to £10.9m in the period to September 30.

Stuart Rogers, chairman and chief executive of Arria NLG, said: "It has been a satisfying year with significant progress in most areas of performance for Arria NLG, and we are pleased with these results."

Arria has signed its first contracts in financial services, aviation and agriculture which Mr Rogers said was the result of "tireless" effort over the year.

Dedicated sales staff in certain areas have also been hired to push development into the likes of oil and gas and financial services.

Mr Rogers said: "Based on decades of research into language and linguistics, Arria's NLG Engine is able to take data, analyse it for the insights it contains, and present those insights in language that you would believe had been written by a human expert in their field.

"Our software allows our clients to take time, cost and effort out of their mission critical business processes, and capture, retain and leverage critical internal knowledge and expertise.

"Over the course of the past year, our primary commercial relationship in oil and gas was expanded in scope, duration and financial value, and our commercial success now expands beyond oil and gas to encompass financial services, agriculture and aviation.

"Albeit from a low base, our client roster has more than doubled in the last 12 months and we expect this rate of progress to increase further in the coming year."

Arria owns the Aberdeen University spin-out company Data2Text, from where much of its software has derived from.

Professor Ehud Reiter, Dr Somayajulu Sripada, Ian Davy and John Perry, all then of Aberdeen University, formed Data2Text to commercialise some of the natural language generation research being done at the institution's school of computing science.

Professor Reiter is now Arria's chief scientist while all four men have stakes in the company. Aberdeen University also has a shareholding.

Mr Rogers said two patents awarded during the year will help to protect Arria's intellectual property.

The creation of a dedicated software development facility, called NLG Studio, is also expected to speed up product deployment from "months to days".

Mr Rogers said: "We continue to invest in the science of NLG through R&D, patenting and enhancing the functionality of our core NLG Engine.

"We have built a great team of scientists, developers and sales people, and we are on track to support future growth in all aspects of our business."