Chapter 9: Text Analytics and Natural Language Processing

Text mining, natural language processing, and natural language understanding continually help businesses and organizations extract valuable insights from unstructured data. As the business environment changes, companies must integrate data from many sources to remain competitive. Text is yet another rich data source collected by an organization both internally from employees and externally from customers. The chapter begins by distinguishing and defining text mining, natural language processing, and natural language understanding. Then two case studies are presented to understand how these technologies are applied in practice, namely on human resources and customer service applications of natural language. The chapter closes with defining steps to mitigate project risk as well as exploring the many industries employing this emerging technology.