Bloomington, IN – May 19th, 2008 The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) deploys the PolyAnalyst™ text mining system to perform the analysis of large collections of aviation safety reports.
“The success of the text mining project at the NTSB underscores the value of applying PolyAnalyst to incident report analysis”
The NTSB is responsible for maintaining the government’s database of civil aviation accidents and conducting special studies of transportation safety issues of national significance. While aviation accidents are rare, reports on thousands of minor safety incidents are collected each month. The analysis of numerous minor incident reports can help one determine and eliminate potential root causes of accidents.
The traditional manual analysis of growing amounts of reports that include text narratives was found to be slow, inefficient and inconsistent. To automate and simplify the analysis of aviation safety reports the NTSB acquired the text mining tool PolyAnalyst from Megaputer Intelligence. Now NTSB analysts can competently determine patterns and trends of safety issues, as well as probable causes of transportation incidents and accidents, through automated analysis of huge collections of incident reports.
PolyAnalyst provides means to address key challenges associated with aviation safety reports analysis. A typical report includes several dozen structured attributes and an associated free text narrative. PolyAnalyst carries out joint analysis of text and structured data, thereby enabling users to identify and visualize patterns and trends hidden in the data.
Aviation safety reports are among the most unyielding text sources because they contain numerous abbreviations, acronyms and misspells. PolyAnalyst’s spell checking algorithm detects possible errors and suggests corrections. The term replacement and dictionary management capabilities provide analysts with the means to utilize thesauruses capturing abbreviations, acronyms and various other semantic relationships between terms.
To help prevent accidents, save lives and reduce injuries, the NTSB develops safety recommendations, based on its investigations and studies, which are issued to Federal, State and local government agencies, and various transportation safety organizations. The PolyAnalyst Reporting Module facilitates generating easy to understand summaries of the analysis results and delivering the created reports to relevant decision makers.
“The success of the text mining project at the NTSB underscores the value of applying PolyAnalyst to incident report analysis,” says Yuri Slynko, Director of Development, Megaputer Intelligence. “The NTSB analysts are pioneers in using PolyAnalyst integrated with third party’s Aviation Thesaurus capturing domain-specific relationships between aviation terms.”
About Megaputer Intelligence
Megaputer Intelligence (www.megaputer.com) is a leading developer of data and text mining software offering tools for predictive modeling and knowledge discovery in large volumes of structured data and text. Megaputer analytical tools enable over 500 customers worldwide to make informed data-driven decisions.
About the NTSB
The National Transportation Safety Board is an independent Federal agency charged with determining the probable cause of transportation accidents and promoting transportation safety. The NTSB investigates accidents, conducts safety studies, and evaluates the effectiveness of other government agencies’ programs for preventing transportation accidents.
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