The amount of information that gets passed through social media on any one given day is staggering. Software works to filter results, present us with what it thinks is most relevant to our tastes and interests, and hopefully generate more buzz. But how does that happen? How does it know that “Paris” refers to a person instead of a place? Or that “Katrina” or “Harvey” might refer to a natural disaster, rather than a person? The answer lies in entity and link extraction software and text mining software, which rely on knowledge bases that help them determine context and what’s being discussed. However, entity and link extraction software and name matching software is used for more than just social media — digital libraries, various search functions, and other information retrieval systems all rely on the results that this software provides.

What Exactly Is Entity and Link Extraction Software?

The term “entity and link extraction software” is a complicated way of saying that this is software that figures out who is being mentioned in text. If there’s the sentence, “What’s in Malibu?” the software parses out the information needed to gather that it’s Malibu the place, not the title of a song or part of a doll.

It uses a knowledge base that’s been previously installed or specifically built to create the context and identify more precisely what is being talked about. It attempts to take the ambiguity out of named entities, as much as possible.

This can also be taken farther with entity resolution, which finds and links mentions of the same entity in multiple data sets. Deduplication, record linkage, and canonicalization are all part of entity resolution.

How Does Text Mining Help Businesses?

Text mining pulls out high-quality information from the text it reads through. Patterns and trends are created using statistical patterns and then those in turn, are analyzed, evaluated, and interpreted. There are four main steps within the text mining process. First, information retrieval must be done, then natural language processing. Afterwards, the information is extracted and then lastly, the data is mined.

Businesses can use text mining in a few different ways to their advantage. They can see more accurate insights that are pulled from a larger range of documents and sources and improve security, by offering up accurate risk, compliance, and threat detection. And the natural language processing aspect can help boost customer engagement, as it can help give businesses an advantage into what customers might be thinking or leaning towards purchasing.

According to the International Data Corporation, less than 1% of data is ever analyzed, but text mining can help resolve that.

What Does the Market For These Services Look Like Going Forward?
In 2016, there were around 2.34 billion social media users globally, but in 2018, it’s estimated that there will be around 2.67 billion. Facebook, alone, has almost two billion active users monthly all across the world, and puts out an incredible amount of data per second. Twitter has just under 320 million monthly active users.

With all this information being created, the IDC predicts that the digital universe will hit over 40ZB in 2020. There’s around 1.7 MB of new information created per person per second — and as more and more people turn to the Internet, that number will surely increase.

Clearly, there’s a huge market for entity and link extraction software and text analysis software. Indeed, by the year 2020, the text analytic market is supposed double from $3 billion to almost $6 billion!

Tapping into this valuable market and letting software work for you could mean big gains for you and your company.