A new report from Hurwitz & Associates seeks to put text analytics vendors in context. In an environment where unstructured text accounts for 80 percent of the data available to companies, the market analyst and research firm has prepared a Victory Index to help companies suss out who can best help them get value from this information.

By providing the ability to analyze unstructured text, extract relevant information, and transform it into structured information, “text analytics has become a key component of a highly competitive company’s analytics arsenal,” write report authors Fern Halper, partner and principal analyst; Marcia Kaufman, COO and principal analyst; and Daniel Kirsh, senior analyst. Often, the research firm notes, companies begin to experiment with text analytics to gain insight into the unstructured text that abounds in social media, and from that move on to other use cases. For instance, they’ll discover value in mining unstructured data and using it with structured data to improve predictive models.

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With the Text Analytics Summit about to get underway, we’re seeing a wave of vendor announcements hit, such as Clarabridge’s news earlier this week. SAS also said today that it’s introduced Industry Taxonomy Rules starter kits, prebuilt add-ons to SAS Enterprise Content Categorization for speeding text analytics implementation efforts. Also on the agenda: Attensity’s announcement of Analyze 6 and its latest vertical out-of-the-box analytics capabilities, aimed at the retail banking industry.

The focus for Analyze 6 was to take the key capabilities of Attensity’s core engine and use that to put text analytics on the desktops of business users who want to understand and respond to customer data – at the speed of social media, which means without waiting for IT experts to create reports for them. “The thing about social media and customer data is it is like a tidal wave,” Attensity CMO Michelle de Haaff says.

Building on its Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Platform Data Grid computing system for helping enterprises quickly analyze large-scale data sets, end users can select from over 100 report templates (with multiple kinds of analytics for each), or they can choose what questions to ask through its new Exploration environment. Basically, that’s a wizard-based way to drill deeper into a category set, leveraging Attensity’s pre-defined semantic classes tailored for each specific vertical industry rather than having to predefine taxonomies themselves to look at data.

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Photo credit: Flickr/Hamed Parham

If your business hasn’t yet begun exploring how it can better understand and respond to the thoughts and opinions about it that consumers share with the world on social media, it may not be long before it does.

Gartner recently released its list of the top ten strategic technologies for 2011, and among the categories on that list was social analytics. The research firm describes social analytics as including techniques ranging from social filtering to social-network analysis to sentiment analysis and social-media analytics.

Those categories – or at least a fair number of the offerings falling into them – owe a lot of their existence to semantic web technologies and standards, from NLP to RDF. As Gartner sums it up, “social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies” and “involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.”

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