SAS is shipping a Text Analytics technology that can be used to discover opportunities and risks in social media information, call centre logs, customer surveys, claims forms, sales returns and other areas.

SAS Text Analytics automates the time-consuming process of reading individual documents and manually extracting relevant information. The technology can be used to "interpret and structure information to reveal patterns, sentiment and relationships to improve decision making", SAS said.

Fiona McNeill, global analytics product marketing manager at SAS, said, “Those involved in enterprise content; web content; document, records and knowledge management; enterprise search; article research; and online marketing measurement can easily access and reuse information with SAS Text Analytics.”

There are four SAS Text Analytics offerings:

SAS Enterprise Content Categorisation applies natural language processing and advanced linguistic techniques to automatically categorise multilingual content.

SAS Sentiment Analysis derives positive and negative opinions, evaluations and emotions of customers and prospects from digital content sources, including blogs, tweets and websites, as well as internal emails, call centre notes and inquiries.

SAS Text Miner incorporates advanced linguistics into SAS’ core data mining solution SAS Enterprise Miner.

SAS Ontology Management creates and maintains consistent and centralised metadata across document collections and textual repositories, so information search-and-retrieval engines can systematically identify common concepts.