I don't know whether you are aware of this, but our colleagues in the commercial department are used to creating a customer card for every customer they deal with. This is quite an informal document that contains some relevant information related to the customer, such as the industry and the date of foundation. Probably the most precious information contained within these cards is the comments they write down about the customers. Let me show you one of them:
My plan was the following—get the information from these cards and analyze it to discover whether some kind of common traits emerge.
As you may already know, at the moment this information is presented in an unstructured way; that is, we are dealing with unstructured data. Before trying to analyze this data, we will have to gather it in our analysis environment and give it some kind of structure.
Technically, what we are going to do here is called text mining, which generally refers to the activity of...