Government Buys into Text Analytics
February 7, 2014
What do you make of this headline from All Analytics: “Text And The City: Municipalities Discover Text Analytics”? Businesses have been using text mining software for awhile and understand the insights it can deliver to business decisions. The same goes for law firms that must wade through piles of litigation. Are governments really only catching onto text mining software now?
The article reports on several examples where municipal governments have employed text mining and analytics. Law enforcement agencies are using it to identify key concepts to deliver quick information to officials. The 311 systems, known as the source of local information and immediate contact with services, is another system that can benefit from text analytics, because it can organize and process the information faster and more consistently.
There are many ways text analytics can be helpful to local governments:
“Identifying root causes is a unique value proposition for text analytics in government. It’s one thing to know something happened — a crime, a missed garbage collection, a school expulsion — and another to understand where the problem started. Conventional data often lacks clues about causes, but text reveals a lot.”
The bigger question is will local governments spend the money on these systems? Perhaps, but analytic software is expensive and governments are pressured to find low-cost solutions. Expertise and money are in short supply on this issue.
Whitney Grace, February 07, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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