Megaputer Spans Text Analysis Disciplines
January 6, 2020
What exactly do we mean by “text analysis”? That depends entirely on the context. Megaputer shares a useful list of the most popular types in its post, “What’s in a Text Analysis Tool?” The introduction explains:
“If you ask five different people, ‘What does a Text Analysis tool do?’, it is very likely you will get five different responses. The term Text Analysis is used to cover a broad range of tasks that include identifying important information in text: from a low, structural level to more complicated, high-level concepts. Included in this very broad category are also tools that convert audio to text and perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR); however, the focus of these tools is on the input, rather than the core tasks of text analysis. Text Analysis tools not only perform different tasks, but they are also targeted to different user bases. For example, the needs of a researcher studying the reactions of people on Twitter during election debates may require different Text Analysis tasks than those of a healthcare specialist creating a model for the prediction of sepsis in medical records. Additionally, some of these tools require the user to have knowledge of a programming language like Python or Java, whereas other platforms offer a Graphical User Interface.”
The list begins with two of the basics—Part-of-Speech (POS) Taggers and Syntactic Parsing. These tasks usually underpin more complex analysis. Concordance or Keyword tools create alphabetical lists of a text’s words and put them into context. Text Annotation Tools, either manual or automated, tag parts of a text according to a designated schema or categorization model, while Entity Recognition Tools often use knowledge graphs to identify people, organizations, and locations. Topic Identification and Modeling Tools derive emerging themes or high-level subjects using text-clustering methods. Sentiment Analysis Tools diagnose positive and negative sentiments, some with more refinement than others. Query Search Tools let users search text for a word or a phrase, while Summarization Tools pick out and present key points from lengthy texts (provided they are well organized.) See the article for more on any of these categories.
The post concludes by noting that most text analysis platforms offer one or two of the above functions, but that users often require more than that. This is where the article shows its PR roots—Megaputer, as it happens, offers just such an all-in-one platform called PolyAnalyst. Still, the write-up is a handy rundown of some different text-analysis tasks.
Based in Bloomington, Indiana, Megaputer launched in 1997. The company grew out of AI research from the Moscow State University and Bauman Technical University. Just a few of their many prominent clients include HP, Johnson & Johnson, American Express, and several US government offices.
Cynthia Murrell, January 02, 2020
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