Text Analytics Platforms Part 1
Text analytics is still largely an immature science, and embraces several different approaches. Natural language processing (NLP) includes dozens of techniques for accomplishing tasks such as language translation, document categorization and tagging, extraction of meaningful terms and so on. Text mining on the other hand is primarily concerned with the extraction of meaningful metrics from unstructured text data so they can be fed into data mining algorithms for pattern discovery. Some suppliers have applied text analytics to very specific business problems, usually centering on customer data and sentiment analysis. This is an evolving field and the next few years should see significant progress. Other suppliers provide NLP based technologies so that documents can be categorized and meaning extracted from them. Text mining platforms are a more recent phenomenon and provide a mechanism to discover patterns which might be used in operational activities. Text is used to generate extra