Australian text analytics company, Leximancer Pty Ltd has claimed a huge leap forward in the capability of software to understand what customers are saying.
Leximancer Pty Ltd was spun-out from The University of Queensland by its main commercialisation company, UniQuest Pty Limited in 2006.
Leximancer has been developing a growing corporate customer base while at the same time expanding the number of researchers using Leximancer’s academic offering.
The University of Queensland is one of six Australian universities with a Leximancer site licence.
The National University of Singapore is the seventh academic site licence holder.
Leximancer version 3.5, which will be released next week, contains a pioneering new 'Automatic Sentiment Lens' feature which will identify whether customers are reacting positively or negatively, and eliminate much of the ambiguity in results returned by other “Voice of the Customer” solutions.
“Sentiment is generally modelled via the introduction of a list of typical sentiment, or emotive, seed words to help 'steer' the technology to determine, or profile, sentiment in the text,” Leximancer Chief Scientist, and research fellow in UQ's Institute for Social Science Research, Dr Andrew Smith said.
“However, this can be prone to error due to the ambiguity of human language and context, for example: is the term 'rubbish' in the text referring to waste material or poor product quality?” Dr Smith said.
“We have extended our learning algorithms to positive and negative terms, to better define their usage and context - and dramatically reduced the impact of rogue or ambiguous sentiment terms in the process.”
The Brisbane-based company said Leximancer software was being increasingly used by organisations in Australia and internationally to discover meaning in the vast quantities of text that defy traditional approaches to data mining.
Leximancer partner SEMA helps its customers improve customer and business processes by leveraging the resulting critical data in multichannel communications.
SEMA’s Dave Kerr says that Leximancer had been a genuine support to its entry into the field of unstructured data analytics.
“Leximancer is simple and intuitive to use and we’re able to produce insights within a matter of minutes. It also provides the flexibility for us to really delve into the data to extract meaning,” Mr Kerr said.
“We’ve been caught in the past with tools that don’t offer as much flexibility as we require which compromises our ability to service the market. “
“We don’t have that problem with Leximancer. “
Leximancer General Manager, Mac Exon-Taylor said the response from SEMA was typical of what customers were saying about Leximancer software.
“Customers are becoming increasingly knowledgeable and understand that many of the claims made by text analytics companies need to be tested,” Mr Exon-Taylor said.
“We find that organisations which explore what our software can tell them about their data - without large set-up costs and time - are amazed.”
“With the Automatic Sentiment Lens they can now utilise a whole host of data held within and outside the organisation, including social media, to get a much more complete picture of what people are saying about them,” Mr Exon-Taylor said.
For more information, contact Mac Exon-Taylor on 617 (0)400 947 482 or mac.exontaylor@leximancer.com.
About Leximancer
Leximancer Pty Ltd is an Australian company that has been providing leading-edge text analytics technology for almost 10 years. The technology was created following seven years research and development at the University of Queensland by Dr Andrew Smith. Andrew's physics and cognitive science background, in conjunction with his working IT application experience, enabled him to envisage and develop an innovative solution to the growing need to readily determine meaning from text. Leximancer has been continually innovating since then and now has a large and growing customer base including Global 500 companies in finance and pharmaceuticals, government organisations, market research companies and educational institutions.
