Minding your business with AI

A new crop of technology grafting AI to data mining techniques is making unstructured data - emails, blogs, business records, manufacturer warranties, and other kinds of text - more useful to companies. This utility sprouts from computers' ability to automatically understand and organize text so that they can slice and dice it. Machine learning, natural language processing, hidden Markov models, and rules-based pattern matching methods parse text for meaning, break it into bits, tag it, and rearrange it. The newly structured text can reveal such information as workflows, instances of impropriety or legal incompliance, cases and causes of problems, and market trends.