Advanced text analytics can link structured data (databases) with unstructured data (news stories, social media, webpages, and documents) in ways that were impossible years ago. These capabilities are unlocking insights and enabling new workflows in business domains where entities—people, places, organizations, disease or drug names and more—are the connectors between data sources.
In the past, research in these domains was limited to keyword search and filtering or faceting on structured or semi-structured metadata. Entities in unstructured text were manually identified, and looked up in structured databases. Today, by combining automatic entity extraction with entity searching, users can automatically identify entity mentions in unstructured data and link them with structured information. This linkage simplifies the process and combines data about an entity into a complete picture, rather than just returning simple search results. This approach goes beyond general problem-solving to linking specific content or topic domains where entities are disproportionately important.
This whitepaper explores how entity search is revolutionizing the decision-making and problem solving process in industries such as e-discovery, social media monitoring, government intelligence, financial compliance, and publishing.