We're celebrating like it's 2019.
Well, I’m trimming my beard and wondering how the hell I’m going to squeeze into my kilt, which can only mean one thing: the Dynamite Awards are back in a real-life setting, and the Wordnerds are ready to party!
Dynamites 2019
We’re absolutely thrilled this year that Elena Lanzarini from our Data Science Team is up for the Rising Star Award. Given this year in memory of the universally admired and painfully missed Nate Sterling, the Award celebrates the people who have recently started on their career in Tech, but have already made a significant impact.
And my word, does Elena qualify. Less than a year out from completing her masters degree (she’s literally attending her graduation on the same day as the Dynamites), she has already spearheaded a feature which is both utterly game-changing and a natural evolution for the Wordnerds customers: automated clustering.
(By way of comparison, a year after my degree I was working in a Spar and getting my mum to do my washing. But I digress).
So what did Elena do?
Most other text analysis platforms work on the idea of categorisation. You get a bunch of text from surveys or social or wherever - and the platform will put it into a set of pre-arranged categories. Some platforms use lists of keywords, some use AI, but they’re all putting data into existing categories.
The flaw in this technique is obvious. What if you don’t know what you’re looking for? What if you’re not looking for something in the pre-arranged categories? What if something new (Like, I don’t know, a once-in-a-century pandemic) comes up?
There is a holy grail in text analytics: totally unsupervised insights from unstructured text data, collated by meaning, which you can measure, track, and action. By bringing together our twin backgrounds of Artificial Intelligence and advanced linguistics, combining it with a range of new innovations, this is what Elena and the rest of the Data Science team has achieved.
It’s unique and revolutionary, but better than both of those things, it’s useful. It means you can find the “unknown unknowns” in your data, without knowing what they’re looking for in advance. It means you can deep dive into the specific things you can action, while also having top-line stats to wow the boardroom.
You can book a demo if you want to see the thing in action. In the meantime, I can’t wait to drink a toast to Elena, to Nate, and to the amazingly innovative and supportive tech community in the North East of England.
