by Angela Guess
A recent interview with Alyona Medelyan and Anna Divoli of Pingar takes a look at why unstructured data is worth the effort it takes to analyze it. Divoli stated, “Every single organization in every vertical deals with unstructured data. Tons of text is produced daily — emails, reports, proposals, patents, literature, etc. This data needs to be mined to allow fast searching, easy processing, and quick decision making.”
Medelyan added, “Big data often stands for structured data that is collected into a well-defined database — who bought which book in an online bookstore, for example. Such databases are relatively easy to mine because they have a consistent form. At the same time, there is plenty of unstructured data that is just as valuable, but it’s extremely difficult to analyze it because it lacks structure. In our presentation, we will show how to detect structure using APIs, natural language processing and text mining, and demonstrate how this creates immediate value for business users.”
Remarking on current trends, Medelyan stated, “Text analytics tools are very hot right now, and they improve daily as scientists come up with new ways of making algorithms understand written text more accurately. It is amazing that an algorithm can detect names of people, organizations, and locations within seconds simply by analyzing the context in which words are used. The trend for such tools is to move toward recognition of further useful entities, such as product names, brands, events, and skills.”
