I'll quickly hit several text-analytics topics in this blog article: a Summit, a Survey, Interest Indicators, and Market Growth.

Market Growth Keeps Pace

In my article, Market Outlook for Text Analytics, I foresaw sustained text-analytics market growth of 25% in 2009. I'm pleased that earnings announcements made since the date I submitted my article, April 6, affirm that prediction. Notably, text-analytics giant (albeit under the guise of an enterprise search platform and applications vendor) Autonomy announced "record revenues, up 23% from Q1 2008 including strong organic growth." (Revenue due to Autonomy's Interwoven acquisition, which closed March 17, would have had only a relatively minor role in this growth.) And TEMIS 2009 Q1 "revenue reflects an overall growth of over 30% compared to last year." This is great news despite a global economic downturn!

Text Analytics Survey

It's important also to look at the demand side, at customer and prospect perspectives.

Please respond to a survey I'm conducting. I'd like to know how your organization is dealing with "unstructured" information and the role text mining/analytics plays or might play. I'll write up survey findings in a free report, available in early June. The survey will take you 5-10 minutes. Please help.

Text Analytics Summit

Next, I want to make sure you're aware of this year's Text Analytics Summit, slated for June 1-2 in Boston. You can get $100 off your registration with the link I've provided if you enter my name in the promotional offer box. (Note that I do not have a financial interest in registrations or the summit.) Also, this year I'll again be leading a workshop, "Text Analytics for Dummies," the afternoon of May 31.

Interest Indicators

Interest in text analysis is growing! I've been interviewed recently by several outlets as a leading consultant and analyst:

• By data-mining newsletter KDnuggets.
• In a podcast, part of Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators series.
• For an article, "Our Sentiments, Exactly," in the Communications of the ACM, April 2009.
• I'm slated to speak on sentiment analysis at the Enterprise Search Summit, which takes place May 12-13 in New York. Do consider attending.
• Lastly, I have a white-paper out on a related topic, "Unified Information Access: Gain Active Intelligence from Content and Data," available for download from sponsor Attivio's site.; The paper's free but sorry, you do have to register to view it.

Covering text analytics software, market, conference, and other news and developments to help KDnuggets readers better understand advances in Knowledge Discovery in Text...

Software

Clarabridge has released Clarabridge Smart Response for real-time automated customer response management. The company calls the solution "the industry's first real-time, automated customer issue analysis, response, and routing solution powered by text mining."

SPSS has released Text Analysis for Surveys 3.0. The company states that the "new version includes pre-built survey categories and expanded language support to easily gather Voice of the Customer feedback from open-ended surveys."

Lexalytics Salience 4.1 is now out and includes an Entity Management Toolkit used to build and train entity recognizers.

Services

Bioalma launched novo|seek in February, a free, text-analytics reliant search engine for biomedical literature in Medline and US Grants. The company aims to compete with Google Scholar and PubMed by combining named entity recognition, information extraction, and knowledge discovery to produce conceptually meaningful results with a greater ease of use than its competitors. Visit http://www.novoseek.com.

A February release of ResponseTek:CEM adds new capabilities for analysis of free-form customer feedback, and integration with customer support tools, to ResponseTek's hosted customer experience management (CEM) software platform. Visit http://www.responsetek.com.

Open Health Natural Language Processing Consortium

The Open Health Natural Language Processing Consortium (OHNLP), launched on March 16 "to facilitate and encourage new annotator and pipeline development, exchange insights and collaborate on novel biomedical natural language processing systems and develop gold-standard corpora for development and testing. The Consortium promotes the open source Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) framework and SDK as the basis for biomedical NLP systems." As part of the launch, Mayo Clinic and IBM have released clinical NLP technologies open source. The two Apache-licensed NLP platforms, cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System) and medKAT/P (medical Knowledge Analysis Tool/Pathology), are based on UIMA and "aim at extracting information from clinical notes and pathology reports.

Book

"Computational Linguistic Text Processing: Lexicon, Grammar, Parsing and Anaphora Resolution" by Rodolfo Delmonte deals with sentence-level linguistic phenomena and text or discourse level linguistic phenomena. It comes with a CD that contains the system GETARUNS for unrestricted text parsing.

Conferences

Enterprise Search Summit 2009 will take place May 12-13 in New York and will include text-analytics content. The summit Web site is www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/2009/.

A detailed program for the fifth annual Text Analytics Summit, June 1-2 in Boston, is available.

The 2009 Semantic Technology Conference is slated for June 14-18 in San Jose. SemTech aims to cover the entire spectrum of business, government, and consumer activity taking place within the emerging field of semantic technologies.

DEFT'09, fifth edition of the DÉfi Fouille de Texte evaluation campaign in text mining, will address this year multilingual opinion analysis. The challenge, now under way, will culminate in a one-day workshop, June 22, 2009, near Paris.

SIGIR 2009, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, will convene July 19-23, 2009 in Boston.

Surveys

I am running a survey studying how organizations use text analytics, what information they're analyzing, and what they look for in solutions. I will relate findings in a free report that will benchmark text-analytics usage and perceptions about the technology and solutions. Please take part in the survey: http://altaplana.com/TAsurvey.

Please participate in Hurwitz & Associates' survey on corporate use of text analytics. Analyst Fern Halper will post results in her blog at http://fbhalper.wordpress.com.