Text mining
Analysis of text mining companies, technology, and trends. Related subjects include:
Maybe text mining SHOULD be playing a bigger role in data warehousing
When I chatted last week with David Bean of Attensity, I commented to him on a paradox:
Many people think text information is important to analyze, but even so data warehouses don’t seem to wind up holding very much of it.
| Categories: Attensity, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, Sentiment analysis, Text mining | 4 Comments |
Attensity update
I had a brief chat with the Attensity guys at their Teradata Partners Conference booth – mainly CTO David Bean, although he did buck one question to sales chief Jeff Johnson. The business trends story remained the same as it was in June: The sweet spot for new sales remains Voice of the Customer/Voice of the Market, while on-premise/SaaS new-name accounts are split around 50-50 (by number, not revenue).
David’s thoughts as to why the SaaS share isn’t even higher – as it seems to be for Clarabridge* – centered on the point that some customers want to blend internal and external data, and may not want to ship the internal part out to a SaaS provider. Besides, if it’s tabular data, I suspect Attensity isn’t the right place to ship it anyway.
*Speaking of Clarabridge, CEO Sid Banerjee recently posted a thoughtful company update in this comment thread.
When I challenged him on ease of use, David said that Attensity is readying a Microstrategy-based offering, which is obviously meant to compete with Clarabridge and any of its perceived advantages head-on.
| Categories: Application areas, Attensity, Clarabridge, Competitive intelligence, Software as a Service (SaaS), Text mining, Text mining SaaS, Voice of the Customer | 1 Comment |
Low-latency text mining in the investment market
I’m not at Gartner’s Event Processing conference, but there seem to be some interesting posts and articles coming out of it. Seth Grimes has one on Reuters’ integration of text mining and event processing, including sentiment analysis. Well worth reading. Lots more detail than I’ve ever posted on similar applications.
| Categories: ClearForest/Reuters, Investment research and trading, Sentiment analysis, Text mining | 4 Comments |
The layered messaging marketing model as applied to Attensity
My general layered messaging theory survived its first test against an IT vendor example – Netezza. Let’s try another, in this case a company that’s not a Monash Research client.
| Categories: Attensity, Competitive intelligence, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 3 Comments |
Lexalytics has merged with part of Infonic
As reported on the Lexalytics blog, sentiment analysis specialist Lexalytics has merged with the text analytics division of Infonic to form Lexalytics Limited. The deal seems to have a screwy financial structure — which Seth Grimes made a valiant effort to decipher (I think from vacation, poor guy) — as is common when companies much too small to be public wind up trading publicly anyway.
Related links
| Categories: Lexalytics, Sentiment analysis | Leave a Comment |
If you think sentiment analysis technology can detect idiom, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you
Text mining tools are just WONDERFUL at detecting idiom, sarcasm, and figurative speech … Yeah, right. I asked Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin whether his tool could do that kind of thing, and he looked at me like I’d just grown a third ear.
Actually, he didn’t. But just like every other sentiment analysis vendor I encountered at the Text Analytics Summit or spoke to beforehand, he made it clear that his tool could only handle straightforward, literal expressions of opinion. Idiom, irony, sarcasm, metaphor, et al. are beyond the current reach of the technology.
Aren’t you just thrilled that I shared that earth-shattering news with you?
| Categories: Lexalytics, Sentiment analysis, Text mining | 14 Comments |
6 trends that could shake up the text analytics market
My last two posts were based on the introductory slide to my talk The Text Analytics Marketplace: Competitive landscape and trends. I’ll now jump straight ahead to the talk’s conclusion.
Text analytics vendors participate in the same trends as other software and technology vendors. For example, relational business intelligence and data warehousing products are increasingly being sold to departmental buyers. Those buyers place particularly high value on ease of installation. And golly gee whiz, both parts of that are also true in text mining.
But beyond such general trends, I’ve identified six developments that I think could radically transform the text analytics market landscape. Indeed, they could invalidate the neat little eight-bucket categorization I laid out in the prior post. Each is highly likely to occur, although in some cases the timing remains greatly in doubt.
These six market-transforming trends are:
- Web/enterprise/messaging integration
- BI integration
- Universal message retention
- Portable personal profiles
- Electronic health records
- Voice command & control
| Categories: BI integration, Enterprise search, Google, Microsoft, Search engines, Social software and online media, Text mining | 1 Comment |
The Text Analytics Marketplace: Competitive landscape and trends
As I see it, there are eight distinct market areas that each depend heavily on linguistic technology. Five are off-shoots of what used to be called “information retrieval”:
1. Web search
2. Public-facing site search
3. Enterprise search and knowledge management
4. Custom publishing
5. Text mining and extraction
Three are more standalone:
6. Spam filtering
7. Voice recognition
8. Machine translation
SPSS update
I emailed a bit with Olivier Jouve last week, and chatted with him at the Text Analytics Summit yesterday. He cited a figure of 2400 SPSS text mining users (unique user organizations). The majority of these are for a low-cost, desktop-based surveys product. But when I pressed him, he eventually gave a 500-1000 figure for actual Text Mining For Clementine users. Read more
| Categories: SPSS, Text Analytics Summit, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | Leave a Comment |
TEMIS tidbits
The usual TEMIS execs didn’t make the trip to the Text Analytics Summit this year. But cofounder Alessandro Zanasi did come, and I chatted with him for a bit. Alessandro is also author of a recent book on text mining, and pretty much a one-man Italian operation for France-based TEMIS. Despite his nominal 100:1 manpower disadvantage vs. Italian national-champion text anayltics vendor Expert System S.p.A., Alessandro proudly rattled off four different Italian government accounts he’d won vs. Expert System, all of them apparently in the government area.
Beyond that, Alessandro denies all the rumors that have grown out of TEMIS being hard to reach recently. He reports that pharma is still TEMIS’s big market, but stresses that this covers a range of apps, from research to Voice of the Market. I do get the sense that TEMIS’s sentiment extraction capabilities are less sophisticated than some of the other vendors’ — but the other vendors I’m thinking of are pretty focused on English, SPSS aside. If you need sentiment analysis in non-English languages — e.g., French or Italian — TEMIS should definitely be on your vendor shortlist.
