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Text Analytics News caught up with three professionals at companies that are pioneering text analytics and big data to ask them some questions about their personal experiences in the analytics industry and the future outlook of the text analytics market. The three professionals include:
- Catherine Van Zuylen - Vice President of Products, Attensity
- Tom H. C. Anderson - President, Anderson Analytics
- Daniel Graham - General Manager Enterprise Systems, Teradata
An excerpt:
Q. When and how did you first get into text analytics, and what was it that attracted you to this technology in the first place?
Anderson:
From 2001 through 2005 I worked on Starwood Hotels Customer Satisfaction Program, and during that time we had over a million VOC Surveys coming in per year. It was very different from other types of research I had conducted in the past, and while we were using very advanced analysis on quantitative data points I realized that the text comments could add so much more explanatory power to the analysis.
In graduate school my main area of interest was in gaining consumer insights through data mining, and though text mining (NLP) was still relatively new at least in terms of adoption, I started exploring the various software already on the market and found we could more easily answer and solve various business questions by leveraging the unstructured data available to us. So in 2005 I started Anderson Analytics and during the past six years we've leveraged these new techniques in a number of ways I hadn't even thought of at the time.
The rise of social media during this time certainly helped propel this field and offer even greater opportunities. Expanding beyond survey research to working with data from Bulletin boards, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter has certainly kept it exciting.