Notes from the Second Annual Text Analytics (formerly Text Mining) Summit
Thursday morning at the Text Analytics Summit featured, among other things, one excellent panel, a couple of lively and interesting presentations, and the usual tedious discussion of “What do we call this technology area anyway?” Lots of airtime went to industry stars such as Olivier Jouve (SPSS), Todd Wakefield (Attensity), Ramana Rao (Inxight), and Mary Crissey (SAS). There also was a gratifying repetition from the front of the room of the statement “Curt is right”, so as of when I’m writing these notes (midday) I’m happy, even if Ramana somehow neglected to join that chorus …
Repeated themes and messages included:
- This technology is practical for a lot of apps. Really, it’s practical. In particular, the vendors feel they’ve done a good job now of separating the technology from the ontology implementation. It was even claimed, sort of, that the technology was a commodity (but see below).
- Growth hasn’t continued on the rocketship trajectory it was on a year ago. It couldn’t. But it’s been very healthy by any other standards. (Actually, SAS later told me they were still growing at the old pace.)
- A typical text mining vendor has 25-30% of its revenue in services. I.e., this really is a license business, unlike a few years ago when it was focused on custom government (defensive/security) applications.
- Like analytics vendors in general, text mining/analytics vendors are selling a lot on an application basis. More than I think they should be, actually. A number of people think that text analytics companies will be bought by various other kinds of software company, to be rolled into their general product lines.
- Nobody is doing anything about the platform advances I think are necessary. However, when prodded, they admit that something like that is needed, and the technology really isn’t finished or a commodity after all. But some other company should do it, because they aren’t going to. Arggh.
I’ve only slept one night in the past three, so I’ll stop here and blog more about the conference later.
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Data capture for the sake of text mining
One of the major factors driving successful use of advanced analytic tools is direct initiatives to procure more data. The single best example I can think of is the gaming industry’s use of otherwise-contrived loyalty cards; improved marketing based on that data at chains like Harrah’s seems to produce upwards of 100% of total profits.
So can we apply the same approach to text mining? One place would be surveys. Rather than those annoying, contrived forms demanding we fill in a lot of choices as if we were taking the SATs all over again, maybe users would be more revealing if they could just write whatever they wanted? The obvious firm to ask is SPSS, which is big both in surveys and text mining, not to mention the intersection of the two markets. So I emailed Olivier Jouve, and he shot back an answer from an airport. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, SPSS, Text mining | 3 Comments |
Site upgrade
Well, it’s time to upgrade to WordPress 2.02, and this is the least active of my blogs.
So if something bad happens to this site, that’s a good suspect as the culprit …
EDIT: Well, it looks OK, with the changes being on the writing/admin side (good) and not in the display (very good). I look forward to discovering whether the glitches that limit trackbacks have been fixed …
| Categories: About this blog | 2 Comments |
About the author
I’m having trouble with static pages in WordPress right now, so I’ll just do the “About” pages for the blog inline as posts.
About the author
Curt A. Monash, Ph.D., has been a top-level software industry analyst and participant since 1981, and has been involved in text technologies ever since he helped raise money for Artificial Intelligence Corporation in 1983. Since the mid-1990s he has done extensive research on text search, some of which appeared in The Spider’s Apprentice, which for many years was an industry-leading guide to search engine use and understanding. He was a panelist at the inaugural Text Mining Summit in 2005.
Fuller biographical information about Curt can be found on the “About” page for the Monash Report and at Curt’s Monash Information Services bio page; software industry leaders’ views of Curt may be seen on the Monash Information Services testimonials page. (Apologetic note: Those pages not excepted, the Monash Information Services site hasn’t been updated for a while, and needs a bit of freshening.)
Curt’s views may also be found in the Monash Report (analysis of software and related industries), Software Memories (personal reminiscences and other historical notes about the last three decades or so of the software and internet industries), and DBMS2 (covering developments in enterprise database management and XML-based SOAs).
Curt’s primary email address follows the template FirstnameLastname@Lastname.com, although disguising it that way is tantamount to closing the pantry door after the spam has already gotten in. Thus, please put a distinctive title on your email, so that your email won’t mistakenly be thrown out with the bad stuff. Mentioning “Text Technologies” would be one excellent idea.
| Categories: About this blog | 2 Comments |
About this blog
I’m having trouble with static pages in WordPress right now, so I’ll just do the “About” pages for the blog inline as posts.
About this blog
The Text Technologies blog tracks and analyzes a group of interrelated, linguistics-based technology sectors, including text mining, search, speech recognition, and text command-and-control. Its coverage area includes but is not limited to sectors that commonly fall under the rubric of “text analytics.”
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