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It has never been easier to collect data via the numerous systems, applications and integrations embedded in the many solutions we consumers, users and business professionals use daily. However, what is done with the data collected and more importantly, the user insight captured, might be where the challenge begins. One of the reasons for this is the format and the system itself where the structured or most often the unstructured data resides.
How does one process all the useful customer feedback in a massive csv file, which there are tons of and the classic everlasting Excel sheet, that a person ends up being appointed at analyzing, cell-by-cell, to capture the real value the data represents for the collector? Luckily, in today's digital age, with digitalization and internet 3.0, we have a rise in algorithms, open-source libraries and solutions that can tackle almost any hurdle along the way. Let us look deeper into the world of data analytics or text analysis, and one of the pieces that allows a data scientist or citizen developer to build on the data insight puzzle of highlighting the principal categories or topics covered in such a data set.
A keyword extractor uses state-of-the-art language models to extract words from a body of text that are especially representative of the overall meaning of the text. Using a keyword extractor is great for document tagging, navigation, and search. They are also used in text summarization and machine translation.
There are two types of keyword extractors: rule-based and statistical:
- Rule-based keyword extractors use a set of manually crafted rules to identify key words in each text. They are great for small data sets but do not work well with large ones. This is because it is exceedingly difficult to write rules that cover all the diverse ways in which key words can be expressed.
- Statistical keyword extractors use mathematical models to identify key words in a text. They are better suited to large data sets and can handle different languages and dialects. However, they require training data, which can be difficult to obtain.
Both types of keyword extractors have their advantages and disadvantages. In general, rule-based keyword extractors are more accurate but require more effort to set up. Statistical keyword extractors are easier to use but can be less accurate.
There are many different keyword extraction algorithms available, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The choice of algorithm depends on the application and the data set.
Some of the most popular keyword extraction algorithms include:
- TF-IDF
- TextRank
- Latent Dirichlet Allocation
- Word2Vec
- Pattern mining
Each algorithm has its own advantages and disadvantages. Some work better with short texts, while others work better with long texts. Some are more accurate than others. Now regarding the use cases for the keyword extractor, there are many we can think of. For example, let us say you have a customer support data set and would like to quickly analyze what the most common issues are that customers contact you about. In this case, keyword extraction can be used to automatically extract the key words and phrases from the customer support dataset. This will save you a lot of time and effort that would otherwise be spent manually reading the dataset.
Another example where keyword extraction can be useful is in machine translation. When translating a text from one language to another, it is often helpful to identify the key words and phrases in the source text so that they can be given special attention during translation. This ensures that the meaning of the text is preserved as much as possible. Keyword extraction can also be used for document summarization. Given a long document, keyword extraction can be used to automatically identify the key points and produce a summary of the document. This can be extremely helpful when trying to quickly understand the main ideas in a document.
These are just some examples of how keyword extraction can be used. As you can see, it is an enormously powerful tool that can save you a lot of time and effort when dealing with substantial amounts of text data. For more information about the different API services check out the Ayfie API Services page and the specific one regarding the Keyword Extraction API.
