Defining Text Analytics
Posted by Seth Grimes Thursday, February 8, 2007 10:37 AM I’ve been writing and speaking and consulting on text analytics for years. This work led to a recent call from Philip Russom, an analyst at the Data Warehousing Institute, late of Forrester, Giga, Hurwitz, and Intelligent Enterprise. Philip invited me to contribute an expert comment – my take on “text analytics” in six sentences or fewer – for a forthcoming TDWI report on BI search and text analytics. I failed. I took eight sentences – we’ll see if Philip cuts them down – and I thought I’d share the lot with you. Text analytics is technology and process both, a mechanism for knowledge discovery applied to documents, a means of finding value in text. Solutions mine documents and other forms of 'unstructured' data. They analyze linguistic structure and apply statistical and machine-learning techniques to discern entities (names, dates, places, terms) and their attributes as well as relationships, concepts, and e...