Enabling Exploration Through Text Analytics

As promised, here are my slides from the recently held Text Analytics Summit. Feel free to download them from SlideShare–some of the animation may not come through in this version (though I try to use such animation sparingly).

I enjoyed the conference, and was pleasantly surprised by the overall intellectual level of participants, who included a number of end-users of text analytics, as well as senior technologists from the leading text analytics vendors. Yes, there were sales and marketing people there too, and the occasional vendor fluff piece, but someone’s got to pay the bills. I believe that all of the presentations will be posted online in the next few weeks.

And, speaking of vendors, I hope to see some of you next week at Endeca Discover. I’ll be delivering an 80s-themed presentation entitles “money for nothing and your tags for free”.

Also, while I have your attention, I urge everyone to spread the word about SIGIR. If you are in industry and have little patience for academic conference, I still encourage you to consider the one-day SIGIR Industry Track. For $300 (compare that to any other industry conference!), you get a chance to hear and meet a star-studded line-up, including:

• Matt Cutts, Google: Web Spam and Adversarial IR: The Road Ahead
• danah boyd, Microsoft Research: The Searchable Nature of Acts in Networked Publics
• Vanja Josifovski, Yahoo! Research: Ad Retrieval – A new Frontier of Information Retrieval
• Thomas (Tom) Tague, Thomson Reuters: Semantic Web and the Linked Data Economy
• Tip House, OCLC: Alexandria 2.0: Search Innovations Keep Libraries Relevant in an Online World
• Panel of enterprise search analysts: Whit Andrews, Gartner; Susan Feldman, IDC; Theresa Regli, CMS Watch
• Panel of enterprise search vendors: Øystein Torbjørnsen, FAST; Peter Menell, Autonomy; Adam Ferrari, Endeca (moderated by Elizabeth Liddy!)

I hope to see many of you there, and I also appreciate if you can spread the word, since SIGIR doesn’t traditionally market to industry professionals.