Real-World Data Mining: Applied Business Analytics and Decision Making

6. Text Analytics and Sentiment Analysis

The information age that we are living in is characterized by rapid growth in the amount of data and information collected, stored, and made available in electronic format. A vast majority of business data is stored in text documents that are virtually unstructured. According to a study by Merrill Lynch and Gartner, 85% of all corporate data is captured and stored in some sort of unstructured form (McKnight, 2005). The same study also stated that this unstructured data is doubling in size every 18 months. Because knowledge is power in today’s business world, and knowledge is derived from data and information, businesses that effectively and efficiently tap into their text data sources will have the necessary ...