Attensity: Packaging Text Processing for Higher Value Applications
June 5, 2008
Enterprise search is like a poinsettia three weeks after the holidays. The form of the lovely plant remains, but the color is gone. Poinsettia look unhealthy, and my mother callously tossed them in the trash.
Attensity has been working to take its core content processing technology and apply it to problems where search-and-retrieval won’t work or have already failed. With a modest cash infusion from the CIA’s not-so-secret venture arm, Attensity refined its “deep extraction” technology and looked for big problems remained unresolved by other vendors.
For example, customer support is a sore spot. It’s expensive. It’s hard to manage because turnover often soars to 50 to 60 percent per year. Automation remains blind to import clues in a customer email or voice call. Many systems can figure out that “I’m going to sue you” is a negative message. But most don’t know what 🙁 means.
Attensity has taken its rocket science technology and created MarketVoice. According to Insurance Technology, a CMP Publication, and created:
a new solution enabling insurers to track, analyze and act on customer conversations in blogs, Web forums, product review comments, and other forms of online customer exchanges
Please, read the original story by Kristi Cattafi here. Do this quickly. CMP, like other traditional publishers, takes some interesting angles on its own search and retrieval system. Sometimes it is very good. Other times, it is a bit disappointing.
MarketVoice uses the deep extraction technology, but the system figures out where problems may be warming to a boiling point. Attensity has made its system easier to set up than some of the others that claim to do similar functions. You may be familiar with ClearForest, now part of Reuters, which is now part of Thomson, a multi-national professional information company. Attensity’s appraoch strikes me as easier to set up and more nimble. Your perception may differ from mine, but I think Attensity’s MarketVoice is a wake up call to vendors of text processing systems that are designed to do one function, leaving the licensee to the job of integrating the system’s outputs. Attensity delivers a product. Others deliver programming tool kits.
The company has also swizzled its deep extraction invention to process content on Web logs. Web log content is often hard to figure out. Some comments are declarative. Some are tongue in cheek. Others are spoofs; for example, today I received a comment from a person claiming to be a Googler. Google does not interact directly with me. This is an “old” Google-conceived rule. This spoofer tipped his hand by contacting me directly. That type of context is beyond the ken of text processing systems. Not even Attensity can figure out the sub text for the alleged Google post and my remarks in this paragraph.
Most text processing systems can’t figure out the context of the information, so indexing these primary and secondary components of an article and figuring out what the link means is not trivial. Atensity’s system grinds through text on a Web log and generates reports about customer sentiment. Attensity’s approach is useful, and it works quite well. You can read more about this system here. If the link 404s, just navigate to www.attensity.com and poke through the information on the site.
Dr. David Bean, a wizard with a passion for language, has been aggressive in his push to make rocket science useful to mere mortals.
Attensity’s productizing of content analysis is a good example of how to grow a market without making your customers withhold their licensing fees. The company is focusing on large back office specialists. More information about this MarketVoice application is here.
As the screws tighten on vendors of pure search or stand alone text processing software, studying Dr. Bean’s retooling of his rocket science technology may be useful. Attensity is a bit ahead of some of its competitors. Companies will sagging revenues may want to bone up on Attensity’s business model sooner rather than later.
I flagged Attensity as a company to watch in my April 2008 study Beyond Search.
Stephen Arnold, June 5, 2008
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