I’d like to thank the Academy for talking Unstructured data

Getting name-checked in an Oscar acceptance speech means you’ve arrived. Getting mentioned more times than God means you’re Steven Spielberg!

Here’s a bit of analytics in advance of the 87th Academy Awards … the folks at Vocativ mined all 1,396 acceptance speeches currently archived on the Academy’s website to find out which members of Hollywood’s power elite can lay claim to the ultimate in Oscar bragging rights: most likely to be name-dropped and there are five people in Hollywood who can say they’ve trumped God — at being mentioned in more speeches, at least.

“The Academy” gets respect in 43 percent of all speeches, and Mom and Dad are recognized 28 percent of the time. However, the most thanked person in Oscar history is Steven Spielberg, who has been thanked a total of 42 times not only by people who starred in his movies but also by those who were simply inspired by him. And as for God? S/He’s only been thanked 19 times.

I spend a fair amount of my time at work tinkering with text analysis technology to transform unstructured, textual data into meaningful pieces of information that can be used within the business context. Unstructured data can improve the quality of existing analytics, or, in some cases, is the key enabler for new types of insights. In a recent TDWI survey, data management professionals were asked which types of data and source systems feed your data warehouse three years from now? The respondents expected a huge increase in unstructured data as a source of warehouse information in the next three years. Really, this data included all manner of content — email, call center transcripts, documents from content management systems, and extranet content from forums or blogs.

So when I see any form of analytics performed on unstructured data from the mainstream, understandably I get overly excited. Unstructured data mining is still a fairly new domain in the business context and I feel technologies like the ones I’m fortunte to have access to (like IBM’s Classification Engine, Watson Explorer, Watson Analytics etc) really go a long way in helping to analyze large volumes of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant and useful.