We create an incredible amount of data every day on a purely social level, with the rise of social media. Indeed, Facebook alone has almost two billion monthly active users all around the world, who create tons of data per second. If you add all the data that businesses, organizations, and government agencies also generate, the flow of information seems almost overwhelming. Yet businesses and agencies use this data on a regular basis to carry out a number of tasks. From keeping us safe to selling us products, big data analysis with the help of entity matching software, text analytics in social media, and topic tagging among other methods, helps provide useful, structured information to people in charge. The field of text analytics is only growing — currently, it has a worth of around three billion dollars and by 2020, is projected to almost double in size, jumping to around six billion dollars.

How Can Text Mining Help Businesses?
There are four parts to text mining. The first is retrieving the information that needs to be mined. Then natural language processing occurs, after which information can be extracted. The last step is data mining. According to the International Data Corporation (the IDC), under 1% of data produced gets analyzed. With text mining at play, the missing 99% could be analyzed and that huge gap could be bridged.

Text mining itself can prove to be a major asset to businesses. For one, it can give businesses more targeted and accurate insights across a larger variety of documents and/or sources. It can also alert businesses to threats, calculate accurate risk and compliance, and boost customer engagement, using the natural language processing part of the process. This lets decision makers see early on how customers are responding to the products or services and what they’re thinking, and lets them change sales tactics or marketing accordingly.

Who Uses Entity Matching Software?
You may find yourself surprised at who uses entity matching software to generate results. It spans a whole host of fields. For example, banks or other firms that deal with financial might use entity matching software to create compliance screening of their clients or employees.

On a government level, border security, counterterrorism units, and cyber security units may all employ this type of software to analyze big data that comes in an unstructured form to keep us safer. This software allows border security to match entity records quickly and correctly against sanction lists, for example. Text analytics can help border security locate dangers near borders and during screenings, pinpoint dangers that could need follow-up and help predict potential future issues at the border before they happen.

And, of course, on a retail or service-based level, businesses may keep an eye on social media accounts to see how their customers really feel about their company and what products or services it offers, and even how they view the competitors. They may even be able to glean information from cookies that clients pick up on their website to see browsing history and be able to gear advertisements more accurately and specifically to certain blocks of consumers.

Why Is Structuring This Information So Important?

Condensing all this data into concise and readable reports allows the average person to understand what conclusions and results to draw from the data. Without the structured analysis, it would be tough to figure out what to zero in on. And there would be so much data that it would be virtually impossible for a single person — or even a team of people — to adequately use.

Entity matching software, text mining, and other methods help “translate” all the content into something usable and useful for businesses and other organizations to use for their own purposes. They can conduct fact based decision making with the information they glean from this data, which we contribute to on a daily basis.

This type work isn’t one many of us think about often, but we’re all adding to the data out there with every keystroke. This information helps in many ways, to run our lives, and keep us safe.