Descriptive, Prescriptive and Predictive

purposes of Text Analytics in Business

Introduction
From the dawn of humankind, we have been analyzing every type of thing or
content we get our hands on. For example, we wondered while looking at the stars
above, observing them, finding patterns in them, analyzing their movement, and
various other aspects. Furthermore, that analysis helped us in navigating, thousands
of years before GPS. When we discovered fire, we were amazed by that. The fire
was a particular thing, which could emit light and provide us heat. We observed
and experimented with that, analyzed its features, and now the fire is one of the
most vital things in our life. Observation and analysis have led to the discovery of
vaccination. Edward Jenner observed that a person who had already suffered from
cowpox is immune to other kinds of poxes. So he inoculated cowpox virus to a 13-
year-old boy and demonstrated immunity to smallpox. All this was a result of
observation and analysis.

We, humans, are the beings of knowledge, observation, and prediction. We analyze
present and past scenarios to predict what will happen in the future. We develop
new technology and improve the current ones. Furthermore, by observing our
surroundings and analyzing how our current technology is working in that, we
achieve that.

Human beings have infinite needs. When the basic needs are fulfilled, we go to
fulfill our secondary needs, then the tertiary, we are never satisfied. When we get
something, we want more. That is what human nature is. We need to analyze what
the population wants. We need to collect information. Then structure it as we want.
And then, we analyze the data to find out about the needs of the population. These
techniques are getting better and better. We are now using advanced technology to
convert the data in a much readable format. This analysis of data and converting
that into the graphs and number, has developed into a vast field, text analytics.
Text Analytics
Text analytics is the automated process of translating large volumes of
unstructured text into quantitative data to discover ideas, trends, and patterns.
Combined with data visualization tools, this technique enables companies to
understand the story behind the numbers and make better decisions. This analyzes
and extracts high-quality and relevant information from any unstructured data,
which can drive further analysis and strategic decision making.

Text analytics provides a complete understanding of all kinds of text, like emails,
social media posts, surveys, customer support tickets, and more. For example, we
can analyze the text and find out how people feel towards a brand on social media
(sentiment analysis), or understand the main topics in product reviews (topic
detention). Then the text analytics can leverage this analysis to identify patterns,
such as a spike in negative feedback, and provides us with actionable insights we
can use to make improvements, like fixing a bug that's frustrating to our users.

Today, most organizations emphasize data to drive business decisions, and

rightfully so. However, data alone is not the goal. Facts and figures are
meaningless if we cannot gain valuable insights that lead to more-informed
actions. Analytics solutions offer a convenient way to leverage business data.
There are four forms of analytics:

1. Descriptive Analytics: What Happened?

It looks at the data statistically to tell us what happened in the past. It helps
us to convert vast amounts of data from the past into an easy to understand
format, like in graphs, charts, dashboards, and reports. For example: When a
cricket player enters the ground, a small box is shown on the television
screen, which summarizes his/her performance from the past. The tabulation
of the performance statistics gives us initial insights into the player's
capability. The Bloomberg Terminal can be said to be an appropriate
platform for descriptive analytics.

2. Diagnostic Analytics: Why did this happen?

 It takes the descriptive data to the next level and finds the reasons for the
data to be this way. It attempts to understand the causes of events and
behavior. It is also known as Root-Cause Analysis. For example, a cricket
player is not performing well for the last few months; here, it will analyze
the data and determine why he/she is not performing well.

3. Predictive Analytics: What will happen next?

It takes historical data and analyses it to predict what will happen in the
future. It can use several methods to do so, like data mining, machine
learning, statistics, modeling, and artificial intelligence. For example, it can
look at the performance data of any cricket player to predict how he/she will
perform in the next series against another team in particular surroundings.
Another unusual example can be apps like "Period Tracker", which tracks
the menstrual cycle of a woman based on the information provided by her,
and it can predict when her next cycle is due.

4. Prescriptive Analytics: What should be done?

It takes predictive analytics to the next level and prescribes what to do next
to gain the maximum benefits. It seeks the best solution among various
choices, given the known parameters. For example, if a cricket player for the
past few matches is getting out while playing a certain kind of shot, it would
prescribe him not to play that kind of shot or how to tackle a particular
bowler. Another significant example is Google Maps, which suggests the
fastest route taking into consideration various factors like congestion,
weather, road conditions.

Text analytics has many advantages – it is scalable, meaning we can analyze large
volumes of data in a short time and allows us to obtain results in real-time. So,
apart from gaining insights that help us make confident decisions, we can also
promptly resolve them. By identifying trends and patterns with text analytics,
businesses can improve customer satisfaction (by learning what their customers
like and dislike about their products), detect product issues, conduct market
research, and monitor brand reputation, among other things.
The Methodology of Text Analytics
(with examples to back each model)
Text Analytics or Text Mining methods can be broadly classified into two kinds
and the usage depends on the kind of information we are trying to deduce. The
types are as follows:

1. Text Classification

2. Text Extraction

Text Classification:
It is the practice of categorizing text into organized pre-defined groups. It employs
Natural Language Processing(NLP) to assign appropriate tags to the analyzed text.
The models available under this are as follows:

● Sentiment Analysis: Sentiment Analysis: It detects the emotional undertones

embedded in customer reviews, survey responses, social media posts, which
helps organizations understand how their customers feel about their brand,
product, or service.

Ex: The reviews are given in Amazon, Flipkart, or any other e-commerce
platform. It is categorized as positive, negative, or neutral comments, and
that is how it shows us the most popular or the most relevant products. This
model is also used in analyzing tweets or social media responses about
specific products.

● Topic Analysis: It detects the underlying backdrop or topic about which the
text is and categorizes accordingly.

Ex: An entertainment on-demand service company like Amazon Prime or

Netflix classifies their content according to various topics like genre, age
group, language, or even quality.

● Language Detection: It identifies and classifies content on a language basis

to cater to the right consumer. It can also be used as a Profanity and abuse
detector.
 Ex: When we type a specific word or phrase on Google in say some regional
or foreign language, it immediately shows us a language detector wherein
we can interconvert languages as well know the meaning of that particular
word or phrase.

● Intent Detection: Topics like how to unsubscribe, how to join our newsletter,
where to find a specific product on our website, when an item will be back
in stock, or when will the refund be received all fall into different 'intent'
categories. When the intent is clear, the company can get back with a follow-
up mail or assist accordingly.

Text Extraction :
This text mining technique identifies and extracts relevant information from a huge
bunch of data. This is also known as Data Scraping.

● Keyword Extraction :

Ex: If Instagram or Facebook want to take down some controversial posts or

hate comments regarding a particular topic, they use this strategy to extract
all relevant posts using a specific hashtag or mentioning certain keywords.

Also, when we do a Google search using specific keywords/ phrases, Google

extracts displays information ranking it with relevancy and similarity.

● Entity Extraction:

Also known as Entity Recognition (NER), it is the technique of finding

mentions of key "things" / "entities" such as people, places, organizations,
dates, and time within text. This is useful if we want to pinpoint precise
locations, events, or people who are in trend or hold a particular influence.
This can be taken a notch higher into Entity Resolution wherein we can
distinguish between similarly named entities.

Ex: If we do a Google search with the name George the first

recommendation of Google would be George Floyd (of the Black Lives
Matter movement fame) since that is what the trending matter is at the
present moment.
Business and Text Analytics
With the advancement of Machine learning and Data Science, Text Analytics
techniques and models are being incorporated into almost every field. Below are
some of the few areas:

● Healthcare:

1. To formulate more wholesome and personalized treatment plans by

analyzing doctor's reports, scientific papers, and news websites for a
particular disease. This is especially helpful for diseases wherein
different people have varied experiences like Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

2. Detect disease outbreaks, especially pandemics or epidemics earlier,

by keeping track of the diagnosis and symptoms as well as analyze
social media posts and comments. Today, in the testing times of
Covid-19, we can predict the time of the peak, the flattening curve,
and the tentative percentage of deaths because of the text analytics
models.

3. Maintaining the Clinical Evaluation Report(CER) of sophisticated

medical devices by extracting data from open source platforms like
PubMed. It will improve the quality of simple, highly marketing
medical devices like the FitBit by identifying its customer feedback.

4. Pharmaceutical companies also use data analytics to understand the

market for drugs and predict their sales.

● Customer Feedback

Customers vent their feelings about a product, service, or brand via various
channels, including social media, review sites, surveys, live chats. Every
company today relies heavily on its customer feedback system before
releasing new deals, engaging in new marketing strategies, tracking the
performance of its current products/services, analyzing its financial curve.
An NPS (Net Promoter Score), which subtracts the percentage of detractors
 from promoters, measures how likely customers are to recommend a
particular product or service to other people. For open-ended responses,
using the sentiment analysis text classification model, companies can
categorize reviews into positive, negative, or neutral. Another useful model
is a topic classifier, which can categorize information by topic and highlight
our customers' key grievance points. One of the biggest marketing blunders
in history is the Coca Cola Fiasco, wherein the Coca Cola company
reformulated its product, and that didn't go down well with its vast customer
base. It has inspired many companies to conduct some surveys or
experiments on small groups of people to get feedback on their new or
remodeled products. So, before introducing a new product to the whole
population, companies first experiment on a small group of people. If the
results are satisfactory, then it is applied to the whole population.

● Banking and Finance

One of the most common uses of predictive text classification analysis is the
Credit-risk model, which predicts that customers will default in a specified
time-frame. The banking industry was one of the early adopters of text
mining technology with traditional systems like the Automatic Processing of
Money Transfer Messages (ATRANS). Now they employ various models
like sentiment analysis, entity recognition, social network analysis.

There are pre-defined data-mining applications in various fields of finance,

like stock-market predictions, financial fraud detection, or financial risk
analysis.

● Mobile Applications

Nowadays, this new marketing trend is where companies(Youtube or

Spotify) offer their customers a free trial period of their premium version
with advanced features and content and see how many people continue to
subscribe and pay for their premium version. This is a unique way to judge
the perception and approval of the current consumer base. Rideshare apps
like Uber, OLA document their customer feedback, and complaints, to
identify the reasons for the bad user experiences. Similarly, food delivery
 apps also analyze customer feedback and rates the restaurants and cafes
accordingly for better user experience.

● IT

Big IT firms like Google and Facebook, store everything the user searches
and likes. They store all kinds of information they could get on the user and
later incorporate machine learning and text analytics to show similar
information to the user. In this way, the application tends to show only those
kinds of information which the user likes. This urges users to use the
application more since they are enjoying their time while surfing on it.

● Customer Service/ Customer Care

Customer service is one of the most critical aspects of attaining customer

loyalty. By automating customer support, we can swiftly categorize, route,
and prioritize issues – all while focusing on more fulfilling tasks that thrive
with human involvement. Customer service employs sentiment analysis
models, urgency detector, and topic classification in order to identify
disgruntled customers, issues that require urgent attention, and route
appropriate team members for the task at hand, respectively. A significant
example in this regard is the presence of an automated chatbot on many
companies' websites to provide immediate assistance regarding varied
topics. Even voice-activated assistants like Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant
employ speech recognition and text classification models. We often use our
telephone, cable, or car customer care platforms to call aid for servicing or
fix any technical issues.

● Crime Prevention

With the ever-rising use of social media, cyber-crime is on its all-time high.
Cyberbullying and Internet predation frequently occur over an extended
period and across several technological platforms (i.e., chat rooms, social
networking sites, cell phones). The Cyber Cell continuously monitors the
actions of potential predators and looks up for keywords closely associated
with such illegal activities. Models are being developed that can even
pinpoint the location of the suspect. Another common thing that is done
 during a police investigation is the evaluation of the call-log of everyone
associated with the particular case. This gives insights into the inter-personal
paradigm of the persons concerned and narrows down the potential motives.

Conclusions
With the help of examples from different industries like Healthcare, IT, Banking,
and Finance, we can show how text analytics can help for descriptive, predictive,
and prescriptive purposes in the business. Text analytics, also known as natural
language processing, is a branch of artificial intelligence. The applications of text
analytics are seemingly endless. More and more data is being collected every day,
which presents new opportunities. Text analytics can deal with the massive
amounts of unstructured data being generated on the internet. Computers are
becoming more and more capable of interacting with humans and performing
human tasks. Text analytics tools give valuable information from data that is not
easily quantified in any other way. It turns the unstructured thoughts of customers
into structured data that can be used by businesses. It uses advanced machine
learning and linguistic algorithms to understand the nuance of written language just
like humans do. Examples include surveys, chatbots, media monitoring systems,
support tickets, call logs, contracts, customer feedback tools, and much more.

Text analytics allows companies to find meaningful information across a variety of

data sources, from customer support tickets to social media interactions. By
aggregating the results of text analysis and using business intelligence tools to turn
the numbers into easy-to-understand reports and graphics, text analytics can
identify patterns, trends, and actionable insights that can be used to make data-
driven decisions. After analyzing customer feedback (like product reviews or NPS
responses) or examining the content of customer support tickets with text analysis
tools, we can leverage these results using text analytics to detect opportunities for
improvement and adapt our product or service to our clients' needs and
expectations.
References
1. https://monkeylearn.com/blog/what-is-text-analytics/#:~:text=Text
%20analytics%20is%20the%20automated,numbers%20and%20make
%20better%20decisions.

2. https://expertsystem.com/need-text-analytics/

3. https://www.logianalytics.com/predictive-analytics/comparing-descriptive-
predictive-prescriptive-and-diagnostic-analytics/#:~:text=Descriptive
%20Analytics%20tells%20you%20what,take%20to%20affect%20those
%20outcomes.

4. https://www.zencos.com/blog/text-mining-examples-advanced-analytics/

5. https://monkeylearn.com/blog/text-analysis-examples/

6. https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/text-analytics/