Mining the Talk: Unlocking the Business Value in Unstructured Information

Description

This is the first book to provide techniques and approaches for mining knowledge from unstructured business information and the business value of this analysis. Mining the Talk describes a fundamentally new approach to mining knowledge from unstructured business information. This unstructured information in "free form text" that the authors refer to as "talk". It's simply the way humans have been communicating with each other for thousands of years, and it's the most prevalent kind of data to be found. Potentially, its also the most valuable, because hidden inside the talk is little bits and pieces of important information, which if aggregated and summarized could communicate actionable intelligence about how any business is running, how its customers and employees perceive it, what is going right and what is going wrong, and possibly solutions to the most pressing problems the business faces. These are examples of the gold that is waiting to be discovered if business can only "Mine the Talk". The primary methodology employed centers on the creation of natural classifications (taxonomies) of the data objects. The book illustrates that the only way to insure the "naturalness" of taxonomies is through expert human intervention at every stage of the taxonomy generation and modeling process. After giving a high level overview the approach, the book dives into a series of real world examples showing how the mining techniques work in practice.