Attensity: A Big 404 in Text Analytics
October 1, 2016
Search vendors can save their business by embracing text analytics. Sounds like a wise statement, right? I would point out that our routine check of search and content processing companies turned up this inspiring Web page for Attensity, the Xerox Parc love child and once hot big dog in text analysis:
Attensity joins a long list of search-related companies which have had to reinvent themselves.
The company pulled in $90 million from a “mystery investor” in 2014. A pundit tweeted in 2015:
In February 2016, Attensity morphed into Sematell GmbH, a company with interaction solutions.
I mention this arabesque because it underscores:
- No single add on to enterprise search will “save” an information access company
- Enterprise search has become a utility function. Witness the shift to cloud based services like SearchBlox, appliances like Maxxcat, and open source options. Who will go out on a limb for a proprietary utility when open source variants are available and improving?
- Pundits who champion a company often have skin in the game. Self appointed experts for cognitive computing, predictive analytics, or semantic link analysis are tooting a horn without other instruments.
Attensity is a candidate to join the enterprise search Hall of Fame. In the shrine are Delphes, Entopia, et al. I anticipate more members, and I have a short list of “who is next” taped on my watch wall.
Stephen E Arnold, October 1, 2016
Attensity Europe Has a New Name
March 30, 2016
Short honk: The adventure of Attensity continues. Attensity Europe has renamed itself Sematell Interactive Solutions. You can read about the change here. The news release reminds the reader that Sematell is “the leading provider of interaction solutions.” I am not able to define interaction solutions, but I assume the company named by combining semantic and intelligence will make the “interaction solutions” thing crystal clear. The url is www.sematell.de.
Stephen E Arnold, March 30, 2016
US and Europe Split After Much Attensity
February 9, 2016
Most companies that are split across oceans usually have a parent company they remain attached to, however, PR Newswire shares that “IMCap Partners Acquire Attensity Europe.” Attensity Group Inc. is a leading provider in customer interaction management and its sub-company Attensity Europe headed its solutions across the pond. Recently, IMCap Partners invested money in a deal for Attensity Europe to split apart from the parent and become an independent company. Thomas Dreikauss will remain the CEO and also become a new shareholder in the new company. None of the details related to the purchase price and other details remain private.
Attensity Europe plans to focus on developing its omni-channel customer service and its market-leading product Respond, multilingual and omni-channel response management software. Respond increases productivity processing customer written requests and ensures better transparency over the service level.
“ ‘The market for CRM solutions is growing by just under 14% a year on average, according to Gartner, and therefore at a much more rapid rate than the overall software market. With Respond Attensity Europe is focusing on the highly attractive and rapid-growth customer interaction management/customer care segment, providing a solution that also fully meets the requirements of very large customer service units. The solution’s analytics, scalability and integration capacity are setting standards in the industry. Respond is a highly flexible, future-proof platform for customer service covering all written communication channels, including social media,” indicated Rolf Menne, operating partner at IMCap. “In cooperation with the highly motivated team at Attensity Europe, we see extremely attractive growth potential.’”
Attensity Europe will be rebranded and already has plans to take off in the coming year.
Whitney Grace, February 9, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Semantic Mitosis: Attensity Splits Apart
February 7, 2016
Attensity is now two outfits. According to “Attensity Europe Breaks from US Parent Company.” The write up does not address the loss of synergy between the US and European sides of the semantic coin.
I learned:
The parties involved have agreed to not disclose any information on the purchase price or further terms of the transaction.
Not too helpful.
The news release points out that the European version of Attensity which is named Attensity Europe GmbH will focus on the customer support line of business; specifically:
the [Attensity Europe] company will focus on the growth segment of omni-channel customer service. Attensity Europe’s core product is the market-leading solution “Respond”, a multilingual and omni-channel response management software, which was designed by the German team of developers in Saarbrücken and has been systematically developed into the market-leading enterprise solution for omni-channel customer service over recent years.I assume that the US Attensity does not have a market leading product; otherwise, why not mention it? Omni-channel gets quite a bit of play. But I am not sure what “omni channel means.”
As an aside, Saarbrücken divorced itself from Germany: Once in 1925 and again in 1947. Might the water in the Saar be a factor in the split ups?
Many questions percolate through my discount coffee pot brain, but these are the questions I routinely ask when reverse mergers, no investment acquisitions, and de-synergies are at work.
My hunch is that US Attensity may have been perceived as slowing down the speeding bullet of Attensity Europe. Worth monitoring the situation.
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2016
Attensity: Discover Now
October 21, 2015
i read “Speedier Data Analysis Focus of Attensity’s DiscoverNow.” Attensity is one of the firms processing content for information signals.The company has undergone some management turnover. The company has rolled out DiscoverNow, a product that runs from the cloud and features “built in integration with the Informatica cloud.” The write up reports:
According to the company, DiscoverNow connects to more than 150 internal and external text-based data sources, including popular enterprise apps and databases such as Salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle/Siebel, Box, Concur, Dropbox, Datasift, Eloqua, JIRA, MailChimp, Marketo, NetSuite, Hadoop, MySQL and Thomson Reuters. It combines insights from these internal data sources with external text sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Reddit, forums and review sites, to offer a robust view of customer activities.
Attensity is, according to the article, different and outperforms its competitors. According to Cary Fulbright, Attensity’s chief strategy officer:
Attensity outperforms competing text analytics systems that rely more heavily on keywords. “We parse sentences by subject, noun and object, so we can identify the context used,” he said. “For example, DiscoverNow understands the difference between the Venetian Hotel, Venetian blinds and Venetian gondolas, or ‘uber cool’ and Uber ridesharing. Our team of linguists is constantly updating our generic and industry-specific libraries with new terms, including slang.”
A number of companies offer text processing systems. Attensity is a mash up of several organizations. DiscoverNow may be the breakthrough product the company has been seeking. To date, according to Crunchbase, the company has ingested since 2000 $90 million.
Stephen E Arnold, October 21, 2015
Attensity’s Semantic Annotation Tool “Understands” Emoticons
April 27, 2015
The article on PCWorld titled For Attensity’s BI Parsing Tool, Emoticons Are No Problem explains the recent attempts at fine-tuning the monitoring and relaying the conversations about a particular organization or enterprise. The amount of data that must be waded through is massive, and littered with non-traditional grammar, language and symbols. Luminoso is one company interested in aiding companies with their Compass tool, in addition to Attensity. The article says,
“Attensity’s Semantic Annotation natural-language processing tool… Rather than relying on traditional keyword-based approaches to assessing sentiment and deriving meaning… takes a more flexible natural-language approach. By combining and analyzing the linguistic structure of words and the relationship between a sentence’s subject, action and object, it’s designed to decipher and surface the sentiment and themes underlying many kinds of common language—even when there are variations in grammatical or linguistic expression, emoticons, synonyms and polysemies.”
The article does not explain how exactly Attensity’s product works, only that it can somehow “understand” emoticons. This seems like an odd term though, and most likely actually refers to a process of looking it up from a list rather than actually being able to “read” it. At any rate, Attensity promises that their tool will save in hundreds of human work hours.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 27, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Attensity Adds Semantic Markup
April 3, 2015
You have been waiting for more markup. I know I have, and that is why I read “Attensity Semantic Annotation: NLP-Analyse für Unternehmensapplikationen.”
So your wait and mine—over.
Attensity, a leading in figuring out what human discourse means, has rolled out a software development kit so you can do a better job with customer engagement and business intelligence. Attensity offers Dynamic Data Discovery. Unlike traditional analysis tools, Attensity does not focus on keywords. You know, what humans actually use to communicate.
Attensity uses natural language processing in order to identify concepts and issues in plain language. I must admit that I have heard this claim from a number of vendors, including long forgotten systems like DR LINK, among others.
The idea is that the SDK makes it easier to filter data to evaluate textual information and identify issues. Furthermore the SDK performs fast content fusion. The result is, as other vendors have asserted, insight. There was a vendor called Inxight which asserted quite similar functions in 1997. At one time, Attensity had a senior manager from Inxight, but I assume the attribution of functions is one of Attensity’s innovations. (Forgive me for mentioning vendors with which some 20 somethings know quite well.)
If you are dependent upon Java, Attensity is an easy fit. I assume that if you are one of the 150 million plus Microsoft SharePoint outfits, Attensity integration may require a small amount of integration work.
According the Attensity, the benefits of Attensity’s markup approach is that the installation is on site and therefore secure. I am not sure about this because security is person dependent, so cloud or on site, security remains an “issue” different from the one’s Attensity’s system identifies.
Attensity, like Oracle, provides a knowledge base for specific industries. Oracle made term lists available for a number of years. Maybe since its acquisition of Artificial Linguistics in the mid 1990s?
Attensity supports five languages. For these five languages, Attensity can determine the “tone” of the words used in a document. Presumably a company like Bitext can provide additional language support if Attensity does not have these ready to install.
Vendors continue to recycle jargon and buzzwords to describe certain core functions available from many different vendors. If your metatagging outfit is not delivering, you may want to check out Attensity’s solution.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2015
Attensity Understands Emoticons
March 13, 2015
Part of big data is being able to make sense of unstructured data, including the pieces that natural language processing software cannot understand like emoticons. Emoticons are an Internet phenomenal where people use grammatical symbols, numbers, and letters to represent feelings and ideas.
They cannot be spoken, so if an organization wants to analysis all of its data they need to be able to interpret emoticons. PC World tells us that Attensity has already created a way to understand emoticons without turning to a teenage girl to translate: “For Attensity’s BI Parsing Tool, Emoticons Are No Problem.”
Attensity’s Semantic Annotation natural-language processing tool was designed to handle large data loads. It can monitor and extract insights from unstructured data, including data from social media platforms and internal information like customer surveys and calls.
“Rather than relying on traditional keyword-based approaches to assessing sentiment and deriving meaning, Attensity’s Java-based product takes a more flexible natural-language approach. By combining and analyzing the linguistic structure of words and the relationship between a sentence’s subject, action and object, it’s designed to decipher and surface the sentiment and themes underlying many kinds of common language—even when there are variations in grammatical or linguistic expression, emoticons, synonyms and polysemies.”
This means Attensity can generate data straight from sentences rendered entirely in emoticons and acronyms.
Another practical use for Attensity’s Semantic Annotation would be to create a translation app for parents trying to decipher their teenager’s text messages.
Whitney Grace, March 13, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Attensity Partners with Moreover at LexisNexis
February 6, 2015
Attensity has cut a deal with LexisNexis for sentiment analysis. Well, technically with the content delivery firm Moreover Technologies, which is now part of LexisNexis. We learn of the deal from a press release at PRNewswire, “Attensity Announces Strategic Alliance with Moreover; Extends Lead Over Competitors for Most Comprehensive Sentiment Analytics on the Market.” Our question—is Lexis Nexis profitable? The write-up tells us:
“Moreover (recently acquired by LexisNexis) provides Attensity direct access to its media management data through the Moreover API, enabling brands to aggregate vast amounts of web resources for real-time sentiment analytics to anticipate industry and consumer shifts. Attensity has incorporated Moreover’s Metabase of news sources into its Pipeline and recently updated Attensity Q solutions, as well as made it available for deep dive business intelligence analysis in Attensity Analyze.”
We’re informed that Attensity can now boast over 550 million data sources—websites, forums, social media, and the like. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Attensity is at the fore of the natural language processing and sentiment analysis fields. Rooted in their development of tools that serve the intelligence community, the company now provides real-time discovery solutions to Global 1000 companies.
Moreover began aggregating global news sources since 1998, and has built their award-winning enterprise data distribution and analytical tools on that early foundation. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, the company was acquired by LexisNexis in October 2014.
LexisNexis’ specialty is workflow solutions for the legal, risk management, corporate, government, law enforcement, accounting, and academic markets. The company traces its roots to the U.K.’s Butterworth publishing house, founded way back in 1818. It is now headquartered in Albany, New York.
Cynthia Murrell, February 06, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Attensity Finds New Data Trends But Is It Different Than Anyone Else?
November 26, 2014
Enterprise Apps Today has an article called “Attensity Boosts Ability To Discover ‘Unknown’ Trends In Data,” discussing how Attensity was updated with new features to detect themes in real-time social data, catch spam, and make it easier to compose/filter queries. Before Attensity’s new software updates, social analytics tools use mentions to measure interest in products. The “mentions” are not the most quantifiable way to see if a product is successful.
The new Attensity Q tracks themes, trends, anomalies, and events around a product in the context of online conversations. This makes it easier to create new vocabularies and brand-unique terms into queries.
” ‘Social analytics has largely been limited up to this point by forming hypotheses and testing them – the hunting and pecking for insights that traditional search requires you to do,” [Senior Project Manager and NLP Strategist Katherine] Matsumoto said. “But there is a growing need for our customers to be presented with findings that they didn’t know to look for. These findings may be within their search topic, adjacent to it or many degrees removed through nested relationships.’ “
Attensity Q has more applications than retail. It can be used for legal departments to detect fraudulent activities and by HR departments to target area for improvement. It could even be used with healthcare patient data to track unusual patterns and offer a better diagnosis.
Rather than bragging about big data’s possibilities, Attensity is describing some practical applications and their uses.
Whitney Grace, November 26, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
