Tech Solution: Text Mining Tools

Companies collect large volumes of information every day, including customer feedback, email, Web documents, blogs, memos, and surveys. No single employee or group has the time to read all the documents, much less sort and classify the bits of essential information, but this vast expanse of text is a treasure trove of customer information. Uncovering that treasure is the job of text mining tools, which discover and extract selected data from large document collections. This can help identify customer trends and business opportunities, generating business insight more efficiently and with less risk.

Megaputer TextAnalyst

Delivery Model: installed software

Price: $15,000--$30,000 per user, depending on the configurations.

Business Benefits: TextAnalyst helps summarize, navigate, and cluster documents in a text database and lets the user perform information retrieval or focus text explorations around certain subjects.

Functionality: TextAnalyst's network technologies ensure accuracy in the analysis of unstructured texts. User-specified dictionaries of included and excluded words allow the investigation to focus on a chosen subject without tangents. TextAnalyst has a Semantic Network, a set of the most important concepts from the text and the relations between these concepts, weighted by importance. A knowledge base can be navigated with links from concepts in the Semantic Network to sentences in the documents that contain the right words.

Contact: Megaputer at 1-812-330-0110; or visit www.megaputer.com

SAS Text Miner

Delivery Model: installed software

Price: Starts at $32,000

Business Benefits: SAS Text Miner reduces time to decisions by streamlining the organizational activities associated with text mining. The system recognizes trends and predicts business opportunities. Text Miner analyzes blogs, customer feedback, and call center notes. It also combines information sources like text and traditional databases.

Functionality: Text Miner can read a variety of document formats, including PDF, ASCII, HTML, Microsoft Word, and WordPerfect. Informative summary graphics make drilldown into textual documents easier. Parsing automatically extracts terms and phrases from large text collections, and reduces words to root forms based on speech, abbreviations, country names, or organization names. The Java client/SAS server architecture reduces network load and speeds query processing.

Contact: SAS Institute at 1-800-727-0025; email at contracts_support@sas.com; or visit www.sas.com

SPSS Predictive Text Analytics

Delivery Model: installed software

Price: Starts at $30,000

Business Benefits: Predictive Text Analytics lets users combine structured and unstructured information into a single predictive data-mining model, improving the accuracy of predictions.
Functionality: SPSS Predictive Text Analytics combines the natural language processing linguistic technologies of SPSS's LexiQuest text mining products with the data-mining capabilities of SPSS's data-mining workbench, Clementine. Predictive Text Analytics analyzes up to one gigabyte of text per hour, with 90 percent or better accuracy. A new interface lets analysts and end users without expertise in linguistics easily perform text mining. Users can access text directly and deploy streams and models to others or for use in other applications.

Contact: SPSS at 1-800-543-2185; email at sales@spss.com; or visit www.spss.com

Contact Editorial Assistant Colin Beasty at cbeasty@destinationCRM.com

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