Text mining
Analysis of text mining companies, technology, and trends. Related subjects include:
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
| Categories: Competitive intelligence, Lexalytics, Sentiment analysis, Text Analytics Summit, Text mining, Text mining SaaS | 1 Comment |
Voice of the Customer/Market is indeed where the action is
I was at the Text Analytics Summit yesterday. After the sessions and theoretically* before the drinks, there was a group of subject- or industry-specific “roundtables.” The three best-attended roundtables by far — each with at least 20% of the total roundtable attendees — were on “Voice of the Market”, “Competitive Intelligence”, and “Sentiment Analysis”. (Yes, those are in practice pretty close to being the same thing.) Thus, over half of the show attendees who voted with their feet on a particular subject area of interest picked one in the customer/marketing area. Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Competitive intelligence, Sentiment analysis, Text Analytics Summit, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 6 Comments |
Attensity update updated
I chatted a bit with Attensity’s CTO David Bean and sales VP Jeff Johnson yesterday at the Text Analytics Summit. Jeff confirmed what has colleagues had already told me — most of the action is now in Voice of the Customer/Market, he expects a very strong June quarter, etc. But one thing I posted last week wasn’t quite right. Hosted implementations (i.e., SaaS) haven’t yet reached the 50% level at Attensity. However, they are indeed growing fast, and they’re all (or almost all) in the Voice of the Customer/Market area.
| Categories: Attensity, Competitive intelligence, Software as a Service (SaaS), Text Analytics Summit, Text mining, Text mining SaaS, Voice of the Customer | 4 Comments |
How much linguisitic sophistication is needed in Voice of the Customer/Market applications?
According to Attensity CTO David Bean:
- Voice of the Customer/Market applications require less linguistic sophistication than other text mining applications.
- Hence, Voice of the Customer/Market apps are easier to get running than other text mining applications, which he conjectures is a big part of the reason for burgeoning sales.
I’m guessing most text mining vendors would agree with those views, although they might not agree with his elaborations, which include: Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Attensity, Competitive intelligence, Expert System S.p.A., Sentiment analysis, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 1 Comment |
Expert System S.p.A. update
I chatted with Brooke Aker, the new CEO of Expert System’s US subsidiary, for quite a while last week. Unfortunately, we had some cell phone problems, and email followup hasn’t gone well, so I’m hazy on a few details. But here are some highlights, as best I understood them. Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Competitive intelligence, Coveo, Expert System S.p.A., Ontologies, Text mining | 2 Comments |
5 ideas for how to pick between Attensity and Clarabridge
Jim D. of UPS asked in the comment thread to the recent Attensity update post how one should decide between Attensity and Clarabridge. I wrote an answer, and then decided to just split it out in a separate post. Here are five ideas about how to pick between Attensity and Clarabridge for the kind of Voice of the Customer/Market application both companies are focusing on.
1. Attensity is the older company than Clarabridge, and is good at more things. Is Clarabridge really good at everything you want them to be?
2. In particular, Attensity has more overall sophistication at linguistic extraction. Do any of the differences matter to you?
3. Both companies are working hard on ease of use, for multiple kinds of user (business user tweaking linguistic rules, IT user, etc.). Whose approach and feature set do you like better?
4. Usually, buying one of these products involves some professional services. Whose organization do you like better?
5. Attensity’s default database schema for its exhaustive extraction is pretty flat and normalized, as befits a happy Teradata partner. Clarabridge’s is more of a star schema, as befits a bunch of ex-Microstrategy guys. Either can be straightforwardly translated into the other, so you may not care — but do you?
| Categories: Attensity, Clarabridge, Competitive intelligence, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 4 Comments |
Attensity update
I chatted recently with David Bean, Attensity’s CTO, and then with marketing exec Phil Talsky. Highlights included: Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Attensity, Clarabridge, Competitive intelligence, Software as a Service (SaaS), Text mining, Text mining SaaS, Voice of the Customer | 6 Comments |
Clarabridge’s customer-experience applications
I talked with text mining SaaS vendor Clarabridge’s CEO Sid Banerjee today. Part of the call covered applications and markets for Clarabridge’s technology. Highlights included: Read more