Seth Grimes recently set the record straight regarding the terms “text analytics” and “semantic content enrichment.” Grimes starts with a few definitions of text analytics: “Text analytics is a set of software and transformational steps that discover business value in ‘unstructured’ text. (Analytics in general is a process, not just algorithms and software.) The aim is to improve automated text processing, whether for search, classification, data and opinion extraction, business intelligence or other purposes.” He adds, “Text analytics draws on data mining and visualization and also on natural-language processing (NLP). Supplement NLP with technologies that recognize patterns and extract information from images, audio, video and composites and you have content analytics.” Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

Lexis Nexis has announced a new release of Lexis Advance which includes “content enriched using SRA’s industry-leading NetOwl® text and entity analytics technology, delivering a more sophisticated semantic search capability to enable legal professionals to conduct better, faster and more relevant research. As one key part of the Lexis Advance application, NetOwl’s entity and relationship extraction capabilities semantically enrich the vast amounts of text-based content offered to legal professional customers.” Read more

We often discuss text analysis and natural language processing (NLP) here at SemanticWeb.com, so we were pleased to see this nice, if incomplete, survey of tools and services for NLP. The article begins, “Although Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been around since the 1950s in the computer science world, more and more uses for this powerful technology are being uncovered every day. Search engines like Google use NLP as one of the ways they extract meaning from web pages, Microsoft has a whole team of people working on NLP projects, and a number of universities have dedicated major resources working on the advancement of NLP, but what about everyone else? NLP has many uses going beyond behemoth websites including uses for the enterprise, small business, and end users.” Read more

A recent article reminds businesses that the semantic web is here and asks what they’re going to do about it. The article states, “Web 3.0 has enabled people and machines to connect, evolve, share and use knowledge. Looking even further ahead, with Web 4.0 wherein we have a self-learning intelligence, the distinctive advantage will come from the combination of semantic technologies, like text analytics, along with other analytical models that extend semantic interoperability. In other words, having feedback loops for improving models – utilizing both semantic representations along with those from areas such as data mining, forecasting, optimization, simulations, and alike. Using these technologies, organizations will create that higher-order learning that did not exist using any one of those methods in isolation.” Read more

On the way from Saplo – that’s the company whose tradeshow trademark is the wearing of shocking green suits by CEO Mattias Tyrberg and his co-founders – is a Prediction API for its text analytics platform. The vendor already provides through its API access to services for entity and topic tagging, related and similar articles, sentiment analysis and contextual recognition upon which developers can build applications.

The Prediction API, due around summer’s end, seeks to predict outcomes from text, as Tyrberg describes it. That is, it assesses how a company name or any other word has been described in text and  finds a correlation between that and expected outcomes, such as sales volumes.

It works by having the user submit historic text and historic data points, from which the technology analyzes the relationship between the meaning of the text and the data that the user wants to have predicted (it also will return data of how good it believes it can predict the outcome, Tyrberg says). After that, the user submits new text data to Saplo for a new time period, and based on that text Saplo returns a prediction of the next outcome.

“Think of it like BI,” says Tyrberg. “You might be able to predict new numbers based on previous numbers, but a lot of information that is available is in written text, and we can find the correlations between the meaning of that text and numerical data.”

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Photo Courtesy: Flickr/Vironevaeh

As we get ready to celebrate the July 4 holiday here in the States, there’s a lot to cheer for about how the Semantic Web can be a force for good when it comes to creating an informed and empowered populace upon which democracy depends. Examples of this include the work being done by the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to translate open government datasets into RDF and create applications using linked government data (read more here); and work by the Sunlight Foundation, which does things such as make semantic information in its OpenCongress wiki available via an API with the help of the Semantic MediaWiki extension.

The departure of Vivek Kundra as federal CIO that takes effect in August  – together with the planned funding cuts to e-government initiatives, such as the Data.gov open data effort –  may take its toll on the data that’s available to Semantic Web initiatives at the federal level. On the other hand, states themselves are plowing ahead, most recently with the launch of the State of Illinois Open Data site that’s built on Socrata’s platform. Socrata supports a number of different formats for developers, RDF among them, with its Open API. Cities won’t be left out of the mix, either, with New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, to name a few, pursuing this agenda.

But let’s take a moment to look beyond government data.

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At SemTech, OpenAmplify’s founder and CEO Mark Redgrave and co-founder and CIO Mike Petit talked to The Semantic Web Blog about the company’s cloud-based technology for extracting meaning from text and what’s next on the horizon.

Most recently, Radian6 incorporated OpenAmplify’s technology as part of its Insights social media monitoring service. OpenAmplify includes a CRM Insight that automatically filters and tags individual comments into to-do categories, such as comment, engage or support.

OpenAmplify expects shortly to have something to show the market about its ability to deal with one of the vexing problems around pronoun ambiguity in text analytics. Watch the video for some details:

Alta Plana Corp.’s Seth Grimes last week pinpointed text analytics market demand as closing in on the $1 billion mark globally, with growth in particular among apps that use NLP to derive business insight (from facts to relationships to sentiment) via social networks, online media, and/or surveys. Among such applications are Clarabridge’s Enterprise and Professional sentiment and text analytics software, which now include features such as embedded connections to some major social media monitoring sources with today’s release of its Tower version 4.5 edition.

On the social media source front, Clarabridge says that users now can directly access data pulled from Lithium, NM Incite Buzzmetrics and Radian6 without leaving its interface, for faster access to conversations and insights. Its new Voice of the Customer (VOC) source framework accomplishes this and is designed to easily adapt to additional sources in the future, as well. Companies could previously add this data to their Clarabridge solutions but not seamlessly, as they can for accommodating social media data from sources like Twitter and Facebook.

Among companies that are looking to create a multichannel Voice-of-the-Customer solution, as Clarabridge brands it, “the majority are using multiple listening platforms today, including Lithium for forums, Bazaarvoice for ratings and reviews, a wide variety of EFM platforms, and social media aggregators like Radian6 and/or Nielsen Buzzmetrics,” CEO Sid Banerjee told the Semantic Web Blog in an email conversation. In addition, companies also often integrate CRM data, email, live chat, and even news data, he says, so they need a single platform to integrate, commonly categorize and quantify sentiment across these sources.

“If you use multiple tools, you get different outputs, and you can’t compare the insights in an apples-to-apples manner,” he says. “Point solutions also don’t easily deploy across an enterprise.”

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An announcement was recently made that “Expert System, the leading provider of semantic software that searches, discovers, classifies and interprets text information, announced that it has been awarded a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its Cogito® semantic platform. The patent, ‘Method and systems for automatically extracting relationships between concepts included in a text,’ safeguards Cogito, which relies on deep linguistic analysis and semantic disambiguation of text to ensure a complete understanding of a text without the use of statistics or keyword based technologies.” Read more

The Sysomos Blog recently discussed its work in text analytics: “While text analysis has been around for many years, it becomes a lot more challenging with social media. Online conversations are informally written, there are too many grammatical and spelling errors, and there is far too much data.”

The article continues, “Over the last few years, our team has developed several key algorithms for machines to make sense of the data: sentiment analysis, language translation, short document summaries, keyword word clouds, visual buzzgraphs, popular phrases, semantic analysis with entities, and key conversations… Read more