Text Analytics 2015 – Technology and Market Overview

A leading analyst and expert on text analytics gives an overview of the past year and looks ahead on text analytics technology and market developments.



Reports and Community

Let’s finish with opportunities to learn more, starting with conferences because there is still no substitute for in-person learning and networking (not that I dislike MOOCs, videos, and tutorials.) Here’s a selection:

  • Text Analytics World, March 31-April 1 in San Francisco, co-located with Predictive Analytics World.
  • Text by the Bay, “a new NLP conference bringing together researchers and practitioners, using computational linguistics and text mining to build new companies through understanding and meaning.” Dates are April 24-25, in San Francisco.
  • The Text Analytics Summit (a conference I chaired from its 2005 founding through 2013’s summit) will take place June 15-16 in New York, the same dates as…
  • The North American instance of IIeX, Greenbook’s Insight Innovation Exchange, slated for June 15-17 in Atlanta. I’m organizing a text analytics segment; send me a note if you’d like to present.
  • My own Sentiment Analysis Symposium, which includes significant text-analysis coverage, is scheduled for July 15-16 in New York, this year featuring a Workshops track in parallel with the usual Presentations track. In case you’re interested: I have videos and presentations from six of the seven other symposiums to date, from 2010 to 2014, posted for free viewing. New this year: A half-day workshop segment devoted to sentiment analysis for financial markets.
LTA2014

The 2014 LT-Accelerate conference in Brussels.

































If you’re in Europe or fancy a trip there, attend:









On the vendor side,

Moving to non-commercial, research-focused and academic conferences… I don’t know whether the annual Text as Data conference will repeat in 2015, but I have heard from the organizers that NIST’s annual Text Analysis Conference will be scheduled for two days the week of November 16, 2015.

The 9th instance of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) takes place May 26-29 in Oxford, UK. And the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, an academic conference, move to Beijing this year, July 26-31.

Reports?

I’ve already cited my own Text Analytics: User Perspectives on Solutions and Providers.

Butler Analytics’ Text Analytics: A Business Guide, issued in February 2014, provides a good, high-level business overview.

And I’m exploring a report/e-book project, topic (working title) “Natural Language Ecosystems: A Survey of Insight Solutions.”

If you know of other market activity, conference or resources I should include here, please let me know and I’ll consider those items for an update. In any case…

Thanks for reading!

Bio: Seth Grimes is a leading industry analyst covering text analytics, sentiment analysis, and analysis on the confluence of structured and unstructured data sources.

Disclosures +

I have mentioned many companies in this article. I consult to some of them. Some sponsored my 2014 text-analytics market study or an article or a paper. (This article is not sponsored.) Some have sponsored my conferences and will sponsor my July 2015 symposium and/or November 2015 conference. I have taken money in the last year, for one or more of these activities, from: AlchemyAPI, Clarabridge, Daedalus, Digital Reasoning, eContext, Gnip, IBM, Lexalytics, Luminoso, SAS, and Teradata. Not included here are companies that have merely bought a ticket to attend one of my conferences.

If your own company is a text analytics (or sentiment analysis, semantics/synthesis, or other data analysis and visualization) provider, or a solution provide that would like to add text analytics to your tech stack, or current or potential user, I’d welcome helping you with competitive product and market strategy on a consulting basis. Or simply follow me on Twitter at @SethGrimes or read my Breakthrough Analysis blog for technology and market updates and opinions.

Finally, I welcome the opportunity to learn about new and evolving technologies and applications, so if you’d like to discuss any of the points I’ve covered, as they relate to your own work, please do get in touch.



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