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Challenges in Analyzing Online Communication

Online communication, also known as Computer-mediated Communication (CMC), is any communication among individuals via networked devices, such as computers and mobile phones1. Online communication is not only textual, but may include other modes of communication: images, audio, video, or a combination of those.  For example, we may participate in a Facebook conversation using a GIF animation along with text or we may use video, audio, and text at the same…
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Entity resolution in text analysis

In our analysis of textual data there are many different types of entities we need to identify and capture such as companies, organizations, places, currencies, stocks, and people. The difficulties in accurately capturing entities in text This task alone can be challenging, but in many scenarios it is further complicated by the fact that entities can be highly contextual and can be referenced in a myriad of forms. Referencing people…
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Normalization in preparation for fuzzy matching

When we need to compare entities stored as string data we often need to consider many different pieces of the string. For example, suppose we examine the following names in our data: Steven M Johnson Steve Michael Johnson When we, as humans, compare these entities, we don’t directly compare each string as a whole. Instead we compare substrings. “Steven” is compared to “Steve,” “M” to “Michael,” and “Johnson” to “Johnson.”…
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Fuzzy matching – Comparing records with string distance measures

In previous posts we have loosely discussed the act of comparing strings. Until now this has been a nebulous term relying primarily on intuition to understand but if we want automated systems such as PolyAnalyst to perform what we call comparison it needs to be well defined and based on calculation. This concept is typically referred to as a string metric and is a method of putting into numbers how…
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