A lot of exciting things are happening out there in the world of Text Analytics. 

If you’re wondering what that is, it’s an area of knowledge management and data mining that deals with the kind of data that doesn’t come neatly packaged in quantitative form, e.g. what your customers are communicating to you in emails, what people are saying about you in online forums, what people are saying about a particular movie in online chat rooms etc - in short, anything that requires the ability to process regular spoken or written language (from inherently unstructured repositories like chat transcripts, etc.) and extract valuable data from it falls under this heading…

Why should you care about this?  If you’re a company like Travelocity, and need to track and analyze over 50K customer emails, 30K survey responses, and over half a million calls a month just to stay on top of major customer concerns and service improvement opportunities, you can hire an army of analysts and human indexers in India or China…or you can use a text mining solution, which is exactly what Travelocity did (good choice)…they turned to a text mining company called Attensity, whose solutions already integrate with those of a number of traditional DW/BI vendors out there like Business Objects, Teradata, and IBM…

(This reminds me of a time not too long ago when I was lived on mac and cheese and indexed articles for the National Library of Medicine for a living… I’d probably be out of a job by now if I’d stuck to it – luckily I was approached by someone who told me there would be a better future for me selling Iomega Zip drives to businesses…)

My friend, Bill Slawski of SEO By The Sea, recently told me about a former employee of AOL who created a text analytics tool which enables companies to mine data on what people were saying about them in Social Media forums…I think he told me Twitter was one of this fellow’s clients, and they were so impressed with it they bought the company from him…I’m not sure if FlixPulse – a site which rates movies based on what people are saying about them in Twitter – is an example of an application of this particular tool, but perhaps it is (either way it’s a really neat concept)…

The uses of text analytics by Travelocity and Twitter are just a few examples of how businesses can benefit from this type of technology…I’ll try to cover other applications of this technology more deeply in future postings on this topic…

By the way, if you’re interested in this sort of stuff for your own company or your own edification, I’ve heard that TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) offers a great course on text mining.