November 14th, 2007 Curt Monash
I just had a quick chat with text mining vendor Clarabridge’s CEO Sid Banerjee. Naturally, I asked the standard “So who are you seeing in the marketplace the most?” question. Attensity is unsurprisingly #1. What’s new, however, is that Inxight – heretofore not a text mining presence vs. commercially-focused Clarabridge – has begun to show up a bit this quarter, via the Business Objects sales force. Sid was of course dismissive of their current level of technological readiness and integration – but at least BOBJ/Inxight is showing up now.
The most interesting point was text mining SaaS (Software as a Service). When Clarabridge first put out its “We offer SaaS now!” announcement, I yawned. But Sid tells me that about half of Clarabridge’s deals now are actually SaaS. The way the SaaS technology works is pretty simple. The customer gathers together text into a staging database – typically daily or weekly – and it gets sucked into a Clarabridge-managed Clarabridge installation in some high-end SaaS data center. If there’s a desire to join the results of the text analysis with some tabular data from the client’s data warehouse, the needed columns get sent over as well. And then Clarabridge does its thing.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in BI integration, Clarabridge, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, IBM and UIMA, Text mining | 1 Comment »
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.)
Read the rest of this entry »
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:
Read the rest of this entry »
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
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 »
June 14th, 2007 Curt Monash
If there was one theme to this year’s Text Analytics Summit, it’s “Voice of the Customer.” Attensity’s pre-conference press release was about a Voice of the Customer offering. Clarabridge’s sponsored user talk was about a Voice of the Customer app. SPSS’s marketing materials emphasized Voice of the Customer. Sentiment analysis and Web/blog scraping were frequently mentioned, in contexts such as “customer care,” “reputation management,” and/or “competitive intelligence.”
But above all, it was “Voice of the Customer.” I know it’s till June, but I think we have our text analytics industry buzzphrase of the year.
Technorati Tags: text mining, customer care, voice of the customer
Posted in Attensity, Clarabridge, SPSS, Text Analytics Summit, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 3 Comments »
March 26th, 2007 Curt Monash
Text mining newbie Clarabridge gave me the all-too-customary “Please let us brief you, but then don’t write about it for a while” routine. Now that it’s OK to post, what I’m up for offering is a few salient points in bullet form.
- The closest analogy to what Clarabridge does is Attensity’s new(ish) strategy – extract “facts” from documents and dump them into a relational database management system. In particular, Clarabridge and Attensity alike make the case “Our categorization is more flexible because it’s applied only after the extraction happens.”
- Clarabridge’s sweet spot is extracting user opinions from short documents. E.g., the customer uses cases they talk about are customer feedback forms, public blog postings, etc. about A. hotels and B. consumer software products.
- Clarabridge has a strong business intelligence mentality, describing the product as “ETL for unstructured data.” But then, it’s spun out of a BI consultancy that itself was founded by Microstrategy veterans.
- Clarabridge uses a different database schema than Attensity. Attensity’s fact-relationship network (FRN) is basically just two thin, long tables. Clarabridge, however, uses a Microstrategy-like star schema, in which different kinds of things that you can tokenize correspond to different dimensions.
Frankly, if somebody wants an alternative to the Attensity/Teradata/Business Objects partnership they could do worse than talk with Clarabridge.
Technorati Tags: Attensity, Clarabridge, text mining
Posted in Attensity, BI integration, Clarabridge, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, Text mining | No Comments »