My two cents on the 2008 Text Analytics Summit

I add my thoughts to others who have blogged on the Summit. See the Seth Grimes posting, for all of the other comments.

• I too agree that it was great to see a large number of end users at the Summit, this year. I was especially interested in the fact that a number of them were in the investigation phase. And, what were many investigating? You got it – Voice of the Customer and the closely intertwined area of sentiment analysis.
• VoC was a major theme. In fact, I was overwhelmed by the number of talks in the area. I thought that the presentation about what Gaylord Hotels is doing with text analytics and VoC was extremely interesting. Tony Bodoh took the audience through a journey beginning with the fact that before text analytics it would take the company weeks to even see customer comments. He said that the working pilot the company did in conjunction with Clarabridge took only 10 weeks. He reported benefits in process improvements, value-oriented marketing, and facility improvements. He even told us about reticular activating systems! Go look that one up.
• I also met a number of people from new start-ups in the sentiment space, each taking a slightly different angle. I wonder if sentiment analysis will become a confusing space in the near future.
• There was some discussion at the Summit about text analytics and Web 2.0. I would have like to hear more about this, as text analytics will be important in Web 2.0
• And speaking of important, another interesting concept was brought up several times – the idea that text analytics will morph to become part of something bigger. I don’t want to say component, although others were.
• I was hoping to hear more about text analytics and content management. At one point, during the expert panel, I had the chance to ask the audience if anyone was deploying their text analytics in conjunction with their content management systems. A handful responded affirmatively. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch up with them. If you’re reading this and are deploying text analytics with your ECM system, I’d like to hear from you.

All in all though, I was impressed with the Summit.