How Text Analysis is Helping to Keep Our Country a Safer Place

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The Internet has given rise to an incredible amount of text being generated at any one given time. Newspapers, magazines, journals, and other sources of information all produce online written content in addition to their print material, while some may operate exclusively online. And when it comes to personal use, social media and blogs have increased the amount of content online. According to the International Data Corporation, the digital universe will be over 40 ZB by 2020, meaning that almost 2 MB of new information is created by every person every second of every day. Government organizations and businesses rely on text analytics, entity matching services, and geotagging to help parse through this information — it can help improve security measures and tell businesses how to best appeal to their customer base.

Tell Me More About Text Analysis

The field of text analytics
is that of turning unstructured text data into actual meaningful data to be analyzed. This data can be used to quantify customer opinions, reviews of products or services, feedback, sentiment analysis, as well as entity extraction to help them make decisions based off facts, not guesses. Businesses often use text analytics to review and analyze customer data and security and/or government agencies use it to research people. Currently, the current value of this market is around $3 billion and is expected to double, hitting almost $6 billion by 2020.

One arm of text analysis is that of text mining, which is made up of four steps. The first step in the process is information retrieval, followed by natural language processing, then information extraction, and lastly data mining. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), under 1% of data is analyzed, but text mining can help us access that missing 99% of data. Additionally, this service can prove extremely helpful to businesses in the following three ways.

Firstly, it can give the business or entity a more precise understanding of what’s going on across a wide range of documents or other sources. Secondly, it can give them a more exact risk, compliance, and threat detection service. And lastly, it can help boost customer engagement using natural language processing to show what customers are thinking early on.

How Does Entity Matching Fit In?

Entity matching is a key part of data integration. In essence, entity matching identifies an entity that’s referring to the real-world entity. This can be a tricky process, thanks to acronyms, abbreviations, slang, or numerous things sharing the same name. For example, “strand” could be referring to the English word like “a strand of thread” or the German word, “strand” which refers to a beach. Entity matching is often connected with record linkage as a way of correctly identifying entities across data.

How Do Services Like Big Data Analysis Help Keep Us Safe Or Help Advertisers?
One application that text analytics has often been used for is border security. It can help support and strengthen these efforts in three big ways. First, it can locate dangers occurring near borders or during screening. It can pinpoint potential dangers that will need to be followed up on and lastly, it can predict future issues that could occur at borders. Security agencies can also use big data analysis or text mining to uncover plots and keep a tight tab on cyber security at large.

For big businesses, this type of analysis can help them figure out what’s working in their business or locate items or services that aren’t selling well or that aren’t favorable among customers. If they can catch it early enough, they can make changes to their product and minimize losses early in the game. They can also keep an eye on larger marketplace trends and what’s working, thereby expanding on those trends and increasing sales.

It’s a hidden world that many people don’t see, but it’s vital to many different aspects of our lives. Businesses looking to stay a step ahead should know that it’s in their best interest to invest in text analytics or identity resolution software.

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