By: Steven Ramirez, Conference Co-Chair, Text Analytics World Chicago
In anticipation of their upcoming conference co-presentation, Understanding our Customers' Customers' Customers' Needs – Text Analytics for B-to-B Businesses at Text 
Analytics World Chicago, June 21-22, 2016, we asked Michael Dessauer, Data Scientist at The Dow Chemical Company and Justin Kauhl, Computational Linguistics Expert at The Dow Chemical Company, a few questions about their work in text analytics.
Q: In your work with text analytics, what behavior or outcome do your models predict?
A: Our team, Dow’s Advanced Analytics Group, service company-wide needs from any 
of our businesses or functions so our project outcomes are very diverse. In general, we get many requests for market insight which boils down to consumer needs, so we try to categorize product features and sentiment around those features.
Q: How does text analytics deliver value at your organization – what is one specific way in which it actively drives decisions or operations?
A: The delivered value statements have come from businesses using our market listening insights to secure value pricing on new product introductions. It’s easier to sell when we can point to overwhelming consumer needs that our analysis uncovers.
Q: Can you describe a quantitative result, such as the predictive lift of your model or the ROI of an analytics initiative?
A: In one case Dow was able to value price a product by 10X and our insights were given credit for contributing to that increase.
Q: What surprising discovery or insight have you unearthed in your data?
A: We have had success using external unstructured data to improve short-term forecasting. It was a bit unexpected but very helpful for some of our existing modeling efforts.
Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at Text Analytics World.
A: We intend to share our experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in developing effective text analytics projects with internal clients. We will share our process, technologies employed, and our best practices learned over the past several years working on text analytics projects.
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Don't miss Michael and Justin’s conference co-presentation, Understanding our Customers' Customers' Customers' Needs – Text Analytics for B-to-B Businesses on Tuesday, June 21, 2016, from 1:30 to 2:15 pm, at Text Analytics World Chicago. Click here to register to attend.
By: Steven Ramirez, CEO at Beyond the Arc, and Co-Chair of Text Analytics World