IBM provides text analytics support through two products. IBM Content Analytics is primarily an extension of enterprise search technologies that adds several useful visualizations to discover structure within text data. LanguageWare on the other hand leverages natural language processing (NLP) to facilitate several types of text analysis.
A major component within IBM Content Analytics is IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search. This supports the visualization of trends, patterns within text and relationships. Facets feature highly in the analysis. These are categories which are derived from text analysis. For example documents on infectious diseases might be categorized by a ‘hepatitis’ facet. The facet-pair view shows how facets (categories) are related to each other, and a dashboard facility allows several analyses to be viewed simultaneously. A connections view displays relationships between various facet values and a sentiment view allows the sentiment behind facets to be displayed. Other components in IBM Content Analytics are targeted at specific applications including healthcare and fraud. Content Classification supports the organization of unstructured content.
LanguageWare uses NLP techniques at the document level. This includes entity and concept recognition, knowledge/information extraction and textual relationship discovery.
As always with IBM these capabilities are offered within the context of supporting infrastructure and services and will primarily be of interest to larger organizations. There is nothing particularly interesting here, and it is likely that less costly and more capable solutions will be available for many text analytics needs.