In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker John Felahi, Chief Strategy Officer at Content Analyst Company, LLC. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

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Speaker Spotlight: John Felahi

Chief Strategy Officer

Content Analyst Company, LLC

 

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels? What is the biggest challenge? Development and maintenance cost? Content control? Brand management? Technology expertise?

One of the biggest challenges to delivering content to the web is making it as findable as possible to potential interested viewers.  While traditional, manual tagging and keyword search methods may have gotten us this far, and may be good enough for some use cases, they’re still not without limitations. The good news is, there are far more advanced, sophisticated – and automated – technologies available to remedy the numerous limitations of manual tagging content and keyword-based search. The limitations of manual tagging and keyword-based include:

  • Term creep – New terms constantly emerge, requiring taxonomies to be constantly updated.
  • Polysemy – Take Apple, for example. Is your user searching for the company, the Beatles’ record label, or the fruit?
  • Acronyms – Texting has introduced an entirely new language of acronyms (LOL, TTYL, WDYT).  Manually tagging content requires the editor to consider possible acronyms the users will be searching for.
  • Abbreviations – Tagging content with long, scientific terms, geographies, etc. require editors to factor these in along with the long terms they represent.
  • Misspellings – Thanks to spellcheck and autocorrect, technology has become much more forgiving for those who never made it past the first round eliminations in their sixth grade spelling bee. Content search, unfortunately, needs to be equally accommodating, if you want your users to find your content – which means tagging it with common misspellings.
  • Language – The web has certainly made the world a much smaller place, but that doesn’t mean everyone speaks English.  Making content findable in any language means it has to also be tagged in multiple languages.

On to the good news – there’s technology that’s been used for years in eDiscovery and the US Intelligence Community to overcome these very challenges, but for different reasons. Because the bad guys aren’t tagging their content to make it more findable, the intel community needs a better way to find what they’re looking for. And in eDiscovery, finding relevant content can make a multi-million dollar difference to the outcome of a particular litigation or other regulatory matter. That’s why tens of thousands of legal reviewers and countless analysts in the intel community use a technology known as concept-aware advanced analytics.

How concept-aware advanced analytics differs from manual tagging and keyword search

As its name implies, concept-aware understands the underlying concepts within the content. As such, it can tag content automatically.  On the viewer’s side, content can be found by simply saying, “find more like this.” Categories are defined by taking examples that represent the concepts of a category. The system “learns” what that category is all about, and can then identify conceptually similar content and apply the same category. The process is the same on the search side. The user points to a piece of content and says, “find more like this.” Or as the content publisher, you present the viewer with conceptually similar content, i.e., “you may also be interested in these articles.”

While concept-aware advanced analytics doesn’t necessarily replace manual tagging and keyword search – which work very well in certain situations – the technology clearly overcomes many of the limitations of traditional tagging and search methods.

Catch Up with John at Gilbane

Track E: Content, Collaboration, and the Employee Experience

E7: Strategic Imperatives for Enterprise Search to Succeed
Wednesday, December, 4: 2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.

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