The 7 Basic Functions of Text Analytics

& Text Mining

September 9, 2019
  6 m, 55 s

Text analytics and natural language processing are often portrayed as ultra-complex
computer science functions that can only be understood by trained data scientists.
But the core concepts are pretty easy to understand even if the actual technology is
quite complicated. In this article I’ll review the basic functions of text analytics and
explore how each contributes to deeper natural language processing features.

Quick background: text analytics (also known as text mining) refers to a discipline of
computer science that combines machine learning and natural language processing
(NLP) to draw meaning from unstructured text documents. Text mining is how a
business analyst turns 50,000 hotel guest reviews into specific recommendations;
how a workforce analyst improves productivity and reduces employee turnover; how
healthcare providers and biopharma researchers understand patient experiences;
and much, much more.

Okay, now let’s get down and dirty with how text analytics really works.

The 7 Basic Functions of Text Analytics

Much like a student writing an essay on Hamlet, a text analytics engine must break
down sentences and phrases before it can actually analyze anything. Tearing
apart unstructured text documents into their component parts the first step in pretty
much every NLP feature, including named entity recognition, theme extraction,
and sentiment analysis.

There are 7 basic steps involved in preparing an unstructured text document for
deeper analysis:

1. Language Identification
2. Tokenization
3. Sentence Breaking
4. Part of Speech Tagging
5. Chunking
6. Syntax Parsing
7. Sentence Chaining

Each step is achieved on a spectrum between pure machine learning and pure
software rules. Let’s review each step in order, and discuss the contributions of
machine learning and rules-based NLP.

1. Language Identification
Fig. 1 – Lexalytics’ text analytics technology and NLP feature stack, showing the
layers of processing each text document goes through to be transformed into
structured data.

The first step in text analytics is identifying what language the text is written in.
Spanish? Singlish? Arabic? Each language has its own idiosyncrasies, so it’s
important to know what we’re dealing with.

As basic as it might seem, language identification determines the whole process

for every other text analytics function. So it’s very important to get this sub-function
right.
Lexalytics supports over 25 languages (first and final shameless plug) spanning
dozens of alphabets, abjads and logographies.

2. Tokenization

Fig. 2 – Most text analytics systems rely on rules-based algorithms to tokenize

alphabetic languages, but logographic languages require the use of complex
machine learning algorithms.

Now that we know what language the text is in, we can break it up into
pieces. Tokens are the individual units of meaning you’re operating on. This can can
be words, phonemes, or even full sentences. Tokenization is the process of
breaking down text document apart into those pieces.
In text analytics, tokens are most frequently just words. A sentence of 10 words,
then, would contain 10 tokens. For deeper analytics, however, it’s often useful to
expand your definition of a token. For Lexalytics, tokens can be:

 Words
 Punctuation (exclamation points intensify sentiment)
 Hyperlinks (https://…)
 Possessive markers (apostrophes)

Tokenization is language-specific, and each language has its own tokenization

requirements. English, for example, uses white space and punctuation to denote
tokens, and is relatively simple to tokenize.

In fact, most alphabetic languages follow relatively straightforward conventions to

break up words, phrases and sentences. So, for most alphabetic languages, we can
rely on rules-based tokenization.

But not every language uses an alphabet.

Many logographic (character-based) languages, such as Chinese, have no space

breaks between words. Tokenizing these languages requires the use of machine
learning, and is beyond the scope of this article.

3. Sentence Breaking
Once you’ve identified the tokens, you can tell where the sentences end. (See, look
at that period right there, you knew exactly where the sentence ended, didn’t you Dr.
Smart?)

But look again at the second sentence above. Did it end with the period at the end of
“Dr.?”

Now check out the punctuation in that last sentence. There’s a period and a question
mark right at the end of it!
Point is, before you can run deeper text analytics functions (such as syntax parsing),
you must be able to tell where the boundaries are on a sentence. Sometimes it’s a
simple process, and other times… not so much.

Certain communication channels <cough> Twitter <cough> are particularly

complicated to break down. We have ways of sentence breaking for social media,
but we’ll leave that aside for now.

4. Part of Speech Tagging

Once we’ve identified the language of a text document, tokenized it, and broken
down the sentences, it’s time to tag it.

Part of Speech tagging (or PoS tagging) is the process of determining the part of
speech of every token in a document, and then tagging it as such.

For example, we use PoS tagging to figure out whether a given token represents a
proper noun or a common noun, or if it’s a verb, an adjective, or something else
entirely.

Part of Speech tagging may sound simple, but much like an onion, you’d be
surprised at the layers involved – and they just might make you cry. At Lexalytics,
due to our breadth of language coverage, we’ve had to train our systems to
understand 93 unique Part of Speech tags.

5. Chunking
Let’s move on to the text analytics function known as Chunking (a few people call
it light parsing, but we don’t). Chunking refers to a range of sentence-breaking
systems that splinter a sentence into its component phrases (noun phrases, verb
phrases, and so on).

Before we move forward, I want to draw a quick distinction between Chunking and
Part of Speech tagging in text analytics.

 PoS tagging means assigning parts of speech to tokens

 Chunking means assigning PoS-tagged tokens to phrases

Here’s what it looks like in practice. Take the sentence:

The tall man is going to quickly walk under the ladder.

PoS tagging will identify man and ladder as nouns and walk as a verb.

Chunking will return: [the tall man]_np [is going to quickly walk]_vp [under the
ladder]_pp

(np stands for “noun phrase,” vp stands for “verb phrase,” and pp stands for

“prepositional phrase.”)

Got that? Let’s move on.

6. Syntax Parsing
The syntax parsing sub-function is a way to determine the structure of a sentence.
In truth, syntax parsing is really just fancy talk for sentence diagraming. But it’s a
critical preparatory step in sentiment analysis and other natural language processing
features.

This becomes clear in the following example:

 Apple was doing poorly until Steve Jobs…

 Because Apple was doing poorly, Steve Jobs…
 Apple was doing poorly because Steve Jobs…

In the first sentence, Apple is negative, whereas Steve Jobs is positive.

In the second, Apple is still negative, but Steve Jobs is now neutral.

In the final example, both Apple and Steve Jobs are negative.

Syntax parsing is one of the most computationally-intensive steps in text analytics. At

Lexalytics, we use special unsupervised machine learning models, based on billions
of input words and complex matrix factorization, to help us understand syntax just
like a human would.

7. Sentence Chaining

The final step in preparing unstructured text for deeper analysis is sentence
chaining, sometimes known as sentence relation.
Lexalytics utilizes a technique called “lexical chaining” to connect related sentences.
Lexical chaining links individual sentences by each sentence’s strength of
association to an overall topic.

Even if sentences appear many paragraphs apart in a document, the lexical chain
will flow through the document and help a machine detect over-arching topics and
quantify the overall “feel”.

In fact, once you’ve drawn associations between sentences, you can run complex
analyses, such as comparing and contrasting sentiment scores and quickly
generating accurate summaries of long documents.

Further reading and resources

Hungry for more information about text analytics?

I’m a big fan of the Wikipedia article on this subject (don’t tell my high school English
teacher). Note that Wikipedia considers Text Analytics and Text Mining to be one
and the same thing. I don’t necessarily agree with that position, but we’ll discuss that
another time.

You can also visit to our technology webpage for more explanations of sentiment

analysis, named entity recognition, summarization, intention extraction and more.