For enterprises seeking to monitor the conversations going on about them in the world, the sheer volume of data is just the beginning of the challenge. Even more daunting is making sense of it all -- a task that can test the resources of the largest organization.
That's where Luminoso aims to help with the Compass tool it announced earlier this month, and it's also the area targeted by Attensity, which on Thursday announced a new parsing engine that can be integrated into existing enterprise systems.
Attensity's Semantic Annotation natural-language processing tool, which is combined with a software development kit for integration with other technologies, is designed to help companies monitor and extract insights from large volumes of unstructured data across disparate sources. That can include external information such as social and news media as well as internal information like customer surveys or calls, the company says.
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.
The result is that it can deliver in real time business intelligence that would take humans hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to achieve, Attensity says.
Semantic Annotation supports English, German, French, Spanish, simplified Chinese (Mandarin) and Turkish. Industry-specific domain-based libraries are also available.
