Meetings

European Text Analytics Summit
26-27 April 2007; Amsterdam
http://www.textanalyticsnews.com/europe07/

On behalf of the organizers and sponsors, I extend a call to text miners -- researchers, developers, and users alike -- to be part of the the up-coming European Text Analytics Summit. The summit will provide an excellent opportunity to learn about the latest technologies and products and applications from end-user, vendor, and analyst points of view.

Summary:

Text Analytics describes a class of computer software and processes for Knowledge Discovery in Text.

Text Analytics applies linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques to discern and annotate "features" -- terms, entities, facts & concepts -- in textual information sources, to extract these features, discover patterns and relationships, and support exploratory and automated analyses of document sets and the knowledge they contain.

Text Analytics is often applied in conjunction with Business Intelligence and Data Mining, which has traditionally been called Knowledge Discovery in Data. The field covers information delivery including Visualisation; it includes Natural Language Processing; and it overlaps information Categorization and Classification and Semantic Analysis -- work with Taxonomies and Ontologies -- as well as Consumer and Enterprise Search.

Text Analytics has created proven value in diverse application domains such as pharmaceuticals, law enforcement and intelligence, warranty claims and quality control, customer relationship management (CRM), social-media analysis and reputation management.

Agenda:

The summit will feature:

• End-user presentations from Merck KGaA, Telecom Italia, Pfizer, Philips, HP, the University of Nebraska-Omaha, and Cisco Systems. The Dutch National Police will discuss their "digital washing machine" concept, that enables them to fight crime more easily by quickly extracting pertinent information from the millions of digital documents they hold.

• Solution provider presentations of new applications and technologies from companies including SPSS, Temis, Nstein, SAS, Basis Technology, ISYS Search, Linguamatics, Viv�simo, LexisNexis, Treparel, and Infolution.

• Updates from from NaCTeM, the UK National Centre for Text Mining, and the European Commission Security Research, which is dedicated to funding text analytics security projects.

• Panels, roundtable discussions, and networking opportunities.

The Amsterdam event follows on the heels of two highly successful Text Analytics Summits held in Boston in June 2005 and June 2006. Analyst Curt Monash wrote in ComputerWorld that "the [2005] Text Mining Summit... was one of the best conferences I've been to in a long time." SPSS Vice President Olivier Jouve called the 2006 summit "the best conference I attended last year."

Please visit the summit site, http://www.textanalyticsnews.com/europe07 for further information.

Seth Grimes, summit chair