Text Analytics Forum 2023

The seventh annual Text Analytics Forum has successfully concluded. The obvious theme was text analytics and Gen AI. The conference was located in Washington DC along with 4 other co-located conferences.

The conference began with a three-hour workshop on Monday that was the largest workshop I’ve given.  The workshop, Text Analytics & GPT/LLM in the Enterprise, was extremely well received as this quote by Feras Yousuf Bati attests:

“I’ve had a very dense 1st day of the #kmworld conference taking place in Washington, DC. I’ve attended two incredibly-rich workshops about Collaborative Digital Platforms for Knowledge in addition to Leveraging GPT technology & Text Analytics within KM. These wonderful workshops were thankfully presented by the very knowledgeable SMEs I had the pleasure to interact with Chad Mairn & Tom Reamy”

The workshop covered the basics of text analytics with a focus on auto-categorization and data extraction.  It also covered how to get started – with both text analytics and Gen AI, what kinds of applications can be built with text analytics and Gen AI, and finally how to combine text analytics and Gen AI on a text analytics software platform.

The conference began with a brief overview of the field of text analytics and the year ‘s new developments which, of course, featured Gen AI and LLMs. This was followed by a keynote from Dorian Selz from the company, Squirro, Generative AI is Just an Intermediate Step.

Some of the highlights included:

• Generative AI & Text Analytics: TA Provides the Foundation for a GPT-driven Enterprise Knowledge Management Application
• Future Knowledge Graphs Will Be a Collaboration Between LLMs and Humans
• NLP for Business & Customer Insights
• Tagging Academic Research Papers: What are LLMs Good For?
• Text Analytics Methods & Techniques
• The Future of Taxonomy: Two Views
• Enterprise Cognitive Architectures: How LLMs Will Integrate with the Enterprise

The first day ended with a demo lab where attendees saw text analytics software in action – from Expert AI, Luminoso, and Megaputer Intelligence.

The essential take aways of the conference?

• That text analytics has an almost unlimited potential for enabling enterprises to get the most from their unstructured text
• Gen AI is the real deal with an extraordinary range of applications
• Put the two together and the value and potential applications is exponential
• Finally, that the place to integrate text analytics and Gen AI is on a text analytics platform.