Veracity - Can Text Analytics help solve Uncertainty of Data?
Linguamatics
Giving a presentation on NLP text mining a couple of weeks ago*, I was asked whether our text analytics solution can help one of the extra Vs of big data – Veracity. This is a much-discussed topic at the moment, and after Volume Velocity and Variety, seems to be the most important of the additional Vs (see Seth Grimes blog for a good discussion on some more “wanna-Vs”).
Veracity, when it comes to data and decision making, can mean many things:
- Does my conclusion make sense?
- Is this particular data point accurate?
- Do I trust this publication?
- Is this assertion evidenced reliably?
- but the bottom line is, if I am making an important business decision, how can I be sure it’s made using the best possible data?
This is obviously a tricky question and has been thrown into public view over recent years with studies trying to replicate critical experimental data and finding reproducibility frighteningly low (e.g. PLoS . So, how can a text analytics tools shed any light in such a minefield?
Scientists in the United States spend $28 billion each year on basic biomedical research that cannot be repeated successfully. That is the conclusion of a study published on 9 June 2015 in PLoS Biology that attempts to quantify the causes, and costs, of irreproducibility.