There’s an incredible amount of data that’s been produced as more people gain access to the Internet and devices that let us access the Internet anytime, anywhere. indeed, the International Data Corporation reports that the digital universe will hit over 40 ZB by 2020 (that means almost two MB of new information is made per person every second). This is unsurprising, given the rise of social media — for example, on a global scale, Facebook has almost two billion monthly active users, who all create an enormous data per second. Yet, despite this this massive influx of data, the IDC also says that under 1% of data is ever analyzed, something that businesses and security and intelligence organizations would love to change, as all this information is highly pertinent to them. Entity resolution software, text mining software, identity resolution software, and other steps are starting to take steps to close that gap.
What is Text Mining and How Does Entity Resolution Software Help?
Text mining is a multi-step process in which high-quality information is extracted from text and is used to answer business problems, for scientific advancements, national security, and social media monitoring, among other uses.
Text mining consists of four general steps. The first is retrieving information, then processing natural language. Information is extracted and then data mining takes place. Text mining is useful to businesses in three large ways. Firstly, it can give them more accurate insights from a much larger range of documents and sources. Secondly, it gives businesses precise risk, compliance, and threat detection. Thirdly, using natural language processing, it can boost how engaged customers are, because early looks into what customers are considering or thinking about are available.
Entity resolution software helps find and connect mentions of the same entity across and in the same data sets. Deduplication, record inkage, and canonicalization are involved to make entity resolution happen and the software makes the process much quicker. This allows businesses and organizations to get more accurate data; for example, businesses could have different addresses or the same person may be referenced in several different ways and entity resolution helps make sure that the entity is linked to all of these references.
Who Uses Text Analytics and Entity Resolution Software?
A significant amount of organizations and businesses use these methods to parse through data they receive. Banks and other financial firms may draw on these processes to run compliance screening for their customers and/or employees. Big firms who want more customer feedback about the business, the products or services it’s offering, or their competitors will also use these tools.
Counterterrorism and cybersecurity task forces who need to run big data analysis find that these softwares help make their job somewhat easier, turning unstructured data into structured data. Similarly, border security or other organizations that need fast and precise matching of records against any sanction lists or other security measures also use this software to get quick results.
How Can This Help These Organizations and Businesses?
Parsing through this data can provide useful information to these organizations and businesses that they would not otherwise have access to. It can help improve sales, expand a customer base, and protect security on a number of different levels.
In particular, text analytics can help strengthen border security by identifying potential dangerous issues by borders or during screening, and pinpointing the ones that need to be followed up on, and predicting what issues could come up in the future at borders.
If you’re looking to boost your business’s capabilities in text or entity analytics, looking into businesses who provide this kind of software is the best way to go.
