Socrates said that, “the unexamined life is not
worth living.” In perhaps a parody
of this statement the Forrester report, Text Analytics Takes
Business Insight To New Depths, states that “unexamined content is a wasted
opportunity.” They look at an array of tools that go beyond simple search. This
might be a good thing as a Google search on the term, the unexamined life is not
worth living, turns up a number of term paper services in its top ten. The Forrester team of Leslie
Owens with
Matthew Brown, Sara Burnes, and Peter Schmidt conclude through the report
subtitle that “An
Obscure Technology Has Found Its Killer App.” I would certainly agree and
appreciate receiving a review copy of this report.
The authors note that
customers, employees, and competitors comment on products, personalities, and
companies in increasingly public places, like Twitter and discussion forums.
Forrester that online ratings and reviews topped the list of trusted material.
The abundance of news and commentary on the Internet could contain actionable
knowledge for your business. This is not simply a Web issue as internal sources
like emails and call center notes are full of product suggestions, feedback on
competitors, and thoughts on the market.
With the rise of enterprise 2.0 and related social media data, the
opportunities for data mining and information overload are expanding. To make
sense of all this content, businesses are turning to text analytics tools.
The team concludes
that this “little-known technology has a compelling value proposition: extract
meaning out of large quantities of text by mining, interpreting, and
structuring information to reveal hidden patterns and relationships.” I am not so sure
about the little known part but I agree with the rest of the statement. Perhaps I am biased because I have been
talking with a lot of vendors in this space. One of the great opportunities of both Web 2.0 and enterprise
2.0 is all the conversational content that it creates. You would be losing a
good bit of the value it you do not look at this content but you need good
tools to do it.
The team found that here
is too much content to review by hand, It is hard to separate a signal from
noise, and here is no way to know what questions to ask. They add that when you don’t know
what’s significant about a set of content, you can’t investigate it with a
search engine. The report reviews a number of the major text analytic players
and should be useful for those making decisions in this space. Text analytics
software typically includes four key components: entity extraction,
categorization, relationship mapping, and sentiment analysis.
The authors caution
that “until recently, text analytics software was obscure and academic, used
primarily by early adopters in the life sciences field… Text analytics is a
framework and a process. It is not always necessary or possible to deploy text
analytics as a single, linear solution from a single vendor.” It does seem that
many of the solutions are complex and are designed to be used by professionals,
often with subject matter expertise in linguistics and statistics. There is
much more and you can obtain the report at the Forrerster web site.
As a post script to my
comments on this useful report I want to say a bit about Darwin Ecosystem. Readers
of this blog will know that I am connected with Darwin. The Darwin Awareness
Engine™ offers a different approach to the same issue. Using chaos theory it uncovers
the emerging themes about a topic, a form of categorization. However, it
operates through a simple interface that is designed to be accessible by a wide
range of people. The Scan Cloud™ visualization allows you to immediately see the
relationships between content groupings in real time within your chosen theme and draw your
own conclusions as to what trends are occurring. It is another way to get into content discovery. Putting The
Darwin Awareness Engine in the hands of experts, will better equip these
individuals to discover new trends in their field. However, ii is also
accessible to the average business user so they can have a greater awareness of
their areas of interest.
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