Briefs

CHICAGO, April 26, 2002 - Only two months after its acquisition of text mining developer LexiQuest, Inc., SPSS Inc. (Nasdaq: SPSS) has integrated LexiQuest's text mining software, LexiQuestä Mine, with its data mining workbench, Clementineâ.

LexiQuest Mine is a linguistics-based text mining application that automatically enables users to quickly identify key concepts, and the relationships between them, when working with thousands of read or unread documents. Clementine discovers the patterns and relationships in numeric data and turns the data into business intelligence. With the integration of these two technologies, customers can easily access LexiQuest Mine from the Clementine user interface and incorporate the text data into the regular flow of the data mining process.

"Eighty percent of data is locked in documents, e-mails and other text formats. The integration of LexiQuest Mine with Clementine enables our customers to mine both text and numeric data, giving them a more complete, accurate picture on which to base decisions," says Peter Caron, SPSS Inc. senior marketing manager. "The ability to mine text and numeric data at the same time gives our customers higher performing models, enabling them to make better predictions, profiles or associations."

An example of text mining and data mining working in tandem would be a telecommunications company's customer defection problem. Customer, demographic, usage and other structured numeric data are used by data mining tools to predict a customer's propensity to leave; but often the reasons for the defections are verbalized to customer call centers or in survey responses. Text mining would be used to analyze the customer's verbal responses by finding the key concepts -- poor service, too expensive, not enough coverage -- and then structuring the concepts as additional fields that can be added to the analysis. Data mining can then be used to cluster, classify, segment, profile and score using this new information.

With SPSS Inc.'s Clementine "we've been very successful in using data mining to analyze patterns in crime," says Inspector Rick Adderley of the United Kingdom's West Midland's Police Department. "Until now we've been limited to using structured numeric data, but much of the information held by police forces is in the form of unstructured text reports. Being able to mine this text will open up new possibilities for us and significantly expand our capabilities for crime pattern analysis, so we're very excited to see this technology being added to SPSS Inc.'s data mining platform."

For more information about the LexiQuest Mine and Clementine integration, contact 800-543-2185 or visit http://www.spss.com/spssbi/lexiclem/.