October 23rd, 2007 Curt Monash
If you take our integrated feed — and you should* — and you happen to pick the email option, that’s delivered via FeedBlitz. I subscribe myself, of course, and today I happened to check the option “Search Monash Information Services” (Monash Information Services is the name of the feed). That goes to this search page.
*That’s what this link is for. Or this one.
Curious to see how results compared to those from our own cross-site search, I tried a search on a company I write a lot about, namely “Netezza.” Nothing came up. Then I tried “Attensity.” Ditto. And “text mining”. Still nothing. In fact, there aren’t even any results on “Monash”.
I think some repairs may be in order …
Technorati Tags: search, Feedblitz
Posted in Blogosphere, Search and text storage, Social software and media | 2 Comments »
October 17th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’m at the Business Objects annual user conference, and had a couple of chances to talk with Inxight/text analytics folks. When I asked about areas of commercial application traction, answers were similar to those I got from Attensity and Clarabridge, but not quite the same. Specifically:
- Voice of the Customer is definitely tops.
- Some of the other applications Attensity and Clarabridge mentioned appear as well (e.g., antifraud).
- Business Objects also has a couple of customers looking at text mining as an aid to medical records, e.g. by helping to catch errors in tabular-field coding.
- There are some projects in actual investment research/analysis/trading, e.g. in correlating news announcements and stock price movements.
The Business Objects/Inxight folks also made a couple of interesting general technical points.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Application areas, BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, Investment research and trading, Voice of the Customer | No Comments »
October 8th, 2007 Curt Monash
More precisely, SAP is acquiring Business Objects, and of course Business Objects already acquired Inxight.
This could be interesting …
Posted in BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, SAP AG and TREX, Text mining | No Comments »
October 6th, 2007 Curt Monash
And for my sixth text mining post this weekend, here are some highlights of the Clarabridge technology story. (Sorry if it sounds clipped, but I’m a bit burned out …)
- Like Attensity, Clarabridge practices exhaustive extraction.* That is, they do linguistics against documents, extract all sorts of entities and relationships among the entities from each document, and dump the results into a relational database.
- Unlike Attensity, which uses a simple normalized relational schema, Clarabridge dumps the extracted data into a star schema. (The Clarabridge folks are from Microstrategy, which – surely not coincidentally – also favors star schemas.)
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Posted in BI integration, Clarabridge, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, Ontologies and context identification, Text mining | 1 Comment »
October 5th, 2007 Curt Monash
Besides asking them technical questions, I surveyed Attensity and Clarabridge last week about text mining application trends, getting generously detailed answers from Michelle De Haaff of Attensity and Justin Langseth of Clarabridge. Perhaps the most important point to emerge was that it’s not just about particular apps. Enterprises are doing text mining POCs (Proofs of Concept) around specific apps, commonly in the CRM area, but immediately structuring the buying process in anticipation of a rollout across multiple departments in the enterprise.
Other highlights of what they said included:
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Posted in Application areas, Attensity, Clarabridge, ClearForest and Reuters, Factiva and Dow Jones, Investment research and trading, Text mining, Voice of the Customer, Voice of the Market/competitive intelligence | 3 Comments »
October 5th, 2007 Curt Monash
Michelle DeHaaff, Attensity’s VP of Marketing, just introduced me to a nice phrase — Voice of the Market, obviously related to Voice of the Customer. As Michelle put it:
We’ve also expanded into what we call Voice of the Market data - providing a combination of analysis on external and internal data
- this is how we’ve heard our customers put it:
*Customer feedback comes in many forms……when customers don’t know you are listening (blogs, public web forums) it is important to hear what they say.
*When customers purposely tell you something (via emails, in surveys, captured in customer service notes) it is not only important, but expected….
The first of those would be Voice of the Market, while the second would be Voice of the Customer.
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Posted in Application areas, Attensity, Text mining, Voice of the Customer, Voice of the Market/competitive intelligence | 2 Comments »
October 5th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve been emailing and/or talking with both Clarabridge and Attensity this week. Since they’re the two big proponents of exhaustive extraction, I naturally asked whether there are any cases exhaustive extraction should not be used. In Clarabridge’s case, it turns out exhaustive extraction is the default, and no customer has ever turned this default off. However, their current high end is several million documents* per year. They suspect that in some current projects with much higher volumes the default may finally be turned off. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Attensity, Clarabridge, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, Text mining | 1 Comment »
October 5th, 2007 Curt Monash
David Bean of Attensity is rightly one of the most popular explainers of text mining, for his clarity and personality alike. I shot a question to him about how Attensity’s exhaustive extraction strategy handled sentiment and so on. He responded with an email that contains the best overall explanation of sentiment analysis in text mining I’ve seen anywhere. Naturally, this is rolled into an Attensity-specific worldview and sales pitch — but so what?
Our exhaustive extraction approach doesn’t compromise detection of qualifiers* because we recognize the qualifications while we have access to the complete linguistic information of the input. Much of that information is later stripped away, since it’s way more information than a user would want. We make sure we project qualifications like you mention in the final representations. In fact, we’ve put a lot of effort into recognizing “voicing,” i.e. distinguishing among negations, conditional statements, and variations in the degree of sentiment.
Examples will help here:
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Posted in Attensity, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, Text mining | No Comments »
October 4th, 2007 Curt Monash
The First Conferences Ltd. folks who bring you the disappointing Text Analytics Summit are now also launching a “Video Search Summit”. It’s the “first annual” such, and is “inaugural.” On the other hand, their site has a page saying: Check out who has attended in the past - it’s an A - Z list of anyone who is anyone in Video Search! And it gives a list of same.
That’s pretty typical for First Conferences marketing. (And I hope they’ll edit that page after they read this …)
If the Video Search Summit is anything like the four Text Analytics Summits First Conferences has organized to date, it will be a great venue for technology vendor executives to chat with each other, untroubled by interruptions from customers* or prospects.
*Except for any they bring along themselves to participate in their talks.
Posted in Text Analytics Summit | No Comments »