New Clarabridge text mining product helps make sense of social media

Text mining company, Clarabridge, has just introduced a new product to help companies cull through social media content to find the content that's most relevant to their companies. The product accesses Alterian’s TechrigySM2 warehouse of social media content including 3 billion pieces of content from blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace and other social media sites.

According to the Clarabridge press release, "SMA then automatically removes unwanted content, sorts actionable from non-actionable topics, and applies enhanced meaning and context to conversations using included Natural Language Processing, classification and sentiment scoring engines."

Sid Banerjee, CEO of Clarabridge says that the use of natural language processing in particular helps sort this information. "Clarabridge, utilizes advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology--which automatically machine-interprets the syntax and context of written word and doesn't just count words or phrases," he says. Banerjee adds, "By performing this deep, linguistic analysis, Clarabridge can accurately classify and assign sentiment not only to each verbatim (i.e., comment), but also to all the individual issues, suggestions, and experiences embedded within those verbatim."

Banerjee says his company has found that a typical three-paragraph blog post contains dozens of opinions, issues, babble, facts and other information. Some is useful and some is not. It sorts through the "chatter and other unwanted content. Using pre-built and role-specific business intelligence reports with interactive root-cause drill down capability, a user can quickly spot emerging issues, praises, or experiences that are relevant and actionable."

As an example, he says a hospitality chain recently found out that a number of guests were locked out of their rooms. He says, it turns out there was an operational time synchronization glitch that caused this issue, which the client quickly remedied. "Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for insights to start bubble up from social media and other feedback without users having to wade through and read the raw feedback," he says.

It's not easy to monitor and make sense of the traffic across the spectrum of social media sites. Having a tool that can monitor this information for you using advanced text mining and natural language processing could be tremendously useful for any organization trying to understand the impact of social media on their brand.

For more information:
- see the Clarabridge press release

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