Indiana University’s Industrial Research Liaison Program (IRLP), a unit of Research and the University Graduate School, provides research and development assistance as well as information services to Indiana’s small businesses and industrial communities, governmental units, and social service agencies. IRLP is funded by the Small Business Administration, the Economic Development Administration, the State of Indiana, and Indiana University. It uses resources and expertise available at Indiana University to assist Indiana businesses in commercializing new products and increasing their competitiveness. Services include research and development assistance, access to business and scientific information, and assistance in finding solutions to applied research problems. The focus of IRLP is the Research and Development Assistance Program, which helps Indiana’s small businesses secure funding for the commercialization of new products, technologies, and services. The IRLP staff uses the federal government’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and research opportunities listed in the Commerce Business Daily to help businesses develop innovative ideas into commercial products.

Problem Solved: IRLP constantly searches the SBIR solicitations and the Commerce Business Daily to identify research funding opportunities for its clients. Prior to installing TextAnalyst, IRLP was relying on a search program that employs the use of technical terminology based on each client’s company profile. This program uses standard Boolean operators, wild cards, word stemming, and a thesaurus to search the text fields of the documents. Yet, IRLP was not able to provide some of its clients with any matches that fit their work expertise due to the following reasons: the specificity of the terminology search based on unique client profiles; the limited ability of the previously utilized program to effectively match relevant queries; and the fact that many of the released solicitations are worded in natural language. TextAnalyst was able to find the necessary matches for those clients that the existing search program was incompatible. With the help of TextAnalyst, potential R&D opportunities are now being found even for the clients with difficult search strategies.

Product Functionality: TextAnalyst performs semantic analysis of the investigated texts and creates a network of the most important terms and their relations in the text. This preprocessing facilitates the new type of search and retrieval of information based on the semantics of investigated texts. At IRLP, TextAnalyst examines the solicitation texts for all query-related words and relevant statements and then retrieves the information. This subject-focused capability then allows the user to edit and customize the results for the needs of the respective client. In addition, TextAnalyst can help in summarizing and clustering texts, explicating the text topic structure, as well as navigating through texts.

Strengths: The natural language processing ability of TextAnalyst and its semantic retrieval capabilities make it an invaluable tool for topic research and information dissemination at IRLP. Its capability to extract the relevant information from a large volume of text makes it unique in the field of text mining.

Weaknesses: TextAnalyst does not have the ability to isolate an individual topic from which the retrieved information was derived and then print those results for the client. It does not have a hide function for eliminating the irrelevant topics in the solicitations.

Selection Criteria: IRLP selected TextAnalyst based on its success in identifying R&D funding opportunities for those clients whose normal search strategy was not producing outcomes, while the topics in the SBIR solicitations clearly contained pertinent opportunities for the client’s economic growth. TextAnalyst is easy to install and maintain, is user-friendly, and is very cost-effective. The ease of operation of the program allows the user to begin applying its functions almost immediately.

Deliverables: TextAnalyst is used at IRLP to identify and compile R&D funding opportunities that are missed by a standard search application. Its subject-focused capability enables the user to compile results that are unique to a client’s company profile and their work expertise. When search strategy results are compiled by IRLP, they are then forwarded to the respective client.

Vendor Support: The customer support and technical advice provided by Megaputer Intelligence is prompt, friendly, and very professional.

Documentation: The documentation provided by the company is concise and extremely helpful, as well as informational. The tutorials are easy to understand, very accurate, and are recommended for anyone using the program for the very first time.

Cindy Moore, B.S., M.A.T.
Marketing & Technical Operations Coordinator
Industrial Research Liaison Program
Indiana University
501 North Morton Street, Suite 109
Bloomington, IN 47404-3730