Communication, culture, and short text messages
Tom Davenport offers a lot of skepticism and a little hope about Enterprise 2.0: Read more
| Categories: Microblogging, Social software and online media | 1 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 | 15 Comments |
Some basics of honest SEO everybody should follow
While I hate dishonest SEO, the honest form serves a valuable purpose. And so I prepared a basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tip list that virtually every enterprise should follow. To wit: Read more
| Categories: Online marketing, Search engine optimization (SEO) | 3 Comments |
JLove — a classic example of online dishonesty
Edit: As of July 9, the offending JLove pages seem to have been removed.
The online dating service industry has a penchant for deceptive ads, as is evidenced by the large number of scantily-clad women in the small town of Acton, MA who are alleged to desire sex with me, not a single one of whom I’ve ever seen in a checkout line at our supermarket.
But I just discovered a new twist, courtesy of a scammy dating service called JLove. Read more
| Categories: Online marketing, Search engine optimization (SEO) | 35 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 |
3 specialized markets for text analytics
In the previous post, I offered a list of eight linguistics-based market segments, and a slide deck surveying them. And I promised a series of follow-up posts based on the slides. Read more
| Categories: Language recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), Spam and antispam, Speech recognition | 2 Comments |
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.
| Categories: Application areas, Competitive intelligence, Expert System S.p.A., Sentiment analysis, TEMIS, Text Analytics Summit, Text mining | 2 Comments |
Intro to Lexalytics
I chatted with Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin at the Text Analytics Summit today. Lexalytics is a 14 person company, which represents a doubling over last year. Jeff thinks Lexalytics is on track this year to double again.
Lexalytics’ main business is OEMing sentiment extraction, e.g. to the many blog-analysis/reputation-management (i.e., Voice of the Market) companies that recently started up and in some cases have been bought by big market analysis firms. Lexalytics can and sometimes does extract the more basic stuff as well, but sentiment analysis is the heart of its business. A partial customer list can be found on the Lexalytics site. Lexalytics extracts in the English language only. Read more