Intelligent Communication Technology: Finding Meaning in Text Mining

You’ve probably experienced both these frustrations with search engines: You’re not quite sure which terms to use, so you poke around hoping you’ll find something relevant, or you get lots of irrelevant results that happen to include your search terms but have nothing to do with what you are looking for.

Text mining, also known as text analytics, promises the ability to find meaning and patterns in mountains of textual material by going far beyond conventional search capabilities. Unlike simple word and phrase searches that require exact or near-exact matches, text mining systems can find relevant material even if you don’t know the specific terminology the sources use, or if they use different words to express the same concepts. By applying linguistic principles through natural language processing, text mining systems can recognize meaning in context. This capability also helps text mining tools filter out irrelevant material that uses the same terms, such as excluding material about biological reproduction if you are searching for material about document or file reproduction.

Another major benefit of text mining is the ability to copy all the searched material and reorganize it into consistent records, even if it came from a variety of sources in different formats. For example, a system could be instructed to pull in social media posts, emails, and text messages and “clean” and merge them into a single data set for easier analysis.

Text mining is a potential solution whenever a business needs to analyze hundreds, thousands, or even millions of text records. Examples of current applications include product research and development (such as searching patent records for similar designs), sentiment analysis (finding trends of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in public tweets, customer emails, and other sources), competitive intelligence (finding out what competitors are up to by analyzing their document and social media output), and risk management (such as analyzing financial news and reports in search of potential risks).

Class activity ideas

  1. Natural language processing applies the same linguistic rules and concepts that humans use to encode and decode language. Ask students if they think computers will ever be able to understand text the way that humans can. Why or why not?
  2. How do students feel about their public social media posts being available for companies and other organizations to analyze?

 

Sources: “About Text Mining,” IBM Knowledge Center, accessed 7 April 2018, www.ibm.com; “What Is NLP Text Mining?” Linguamatics, accessed 7 April 2018, www.linguamatics.com; Text Mining Applications: 10 Examples Today,” Expert System, 18 April 2016, www.expertsystem.com.

Encourage Your Students to Put Their New Skills to Work Right Away

The business communication course offers unusual value for students because the insights they gain and the skills they develop can be applied in so many aspects of their personal and professional lives.

In the upcoming Thirteenth Edition of Excellence in Business Communication, we’ve added a highlight box theme called Apply Your Skills Now. These boxes give students practical advice on applying their communication skills right away—in other courses, on the job if they are working, and in their personal relationships. Over the next few months, we’ll share these ideas here on the blog as well, and we hope you’re find them helpful in stimulating positive discussions with your students.

A good place for most students to start is improving the level of professionalism in their communication efforts. The sooner they can get in sync with the professional work environment, the sooner they are likely to succeed in their first jobs and position themselves for promotions. You no doubt address this subject already in your course, but in case you need some specific ideas to share, here are ways you can encourage students to practice their professionalism:

  • Communication with all their instructors. If your students have ever started an email message to an instructor with “Yo, prof,” now would be a good time to up their game. Ask them to imagine they are communicating with a high-level executive or someone else whose opinion of them will have a huge impact on their career advancement. They don’t need be stiff and overly formal; advise them to read the situation based on how each instructor communicates—which is also good practice for audience analysis. Use respectful greetings (ask instructors how they would like to be greeted in person and in writing, if they haven’t already told their students), complete sentences, and standard punctuation.
  • The quality of their work. Remind students that everything they produce reflects their commitment to quality, in both substance and presentation. Encourage them to get in the habit of doing their best work now, and it’ll be second nature by the time they’re getting paid to do it.
  • Scheduling and commitments. Missing deadlines on the job can mean missing major career opportunities. Meeting commitments requires the ability to estimate how long things will take (which comes with practice and careful planning), the insight to identify potential problems, and the mental strength to power through the tough parts of a project. (A future blog post in this series will offer students advice on preventing last-minute surprises when they are staring down deadlines.)

If you have any related tips you’d like to share with other instructors, please leave them in the comments.

 

Image

The Next Wave of Innovation in Business Communication

The last few decades have been marked by waves of technology-driven innovation in business communication, starting with digital’s disruption of print communication, then social media giving a voice to everyone in the marketplace, followed by the way mobile is freeing communicators from their desks.

We’re well into the next wave, and this one could be the most intriguing and far-reaching of all: the application of artificial intelligence to enhance the communication experience. Starting with the upcoming 13th Edition of Excellence in Business Communication (releasing in January 2019) we are covering communication uses of AI that students are likely to encounter on the job or in their job-search efforts.

The Recent Explosion of Business AI

Although “artificial intelligence” still has a science fiction ring to it, forms of AI are now used extensively in business and business communication. It’s a virtual guarantee that your students are already experiencing AI as consumers—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Spotify are just a few of the companies that rely on AI to deliver their services.

Research in AI has been going on for more than a half century, but the practical outcomes never really lived up to hopes until recently, when several developments converged within the space of a few years. First, the primary focus of the research shifted from pursuing the generalized, humanlike intelligence of science fiction (sometimes called general AI or strong AI) to developing specialized systems aimed at handling specific tasks such as reading text or recognizing images (called narrow AI or weak AI). Second, an AI method involving neural networks, which emulate the function of neurons in the brain, was refined in a way that made it much more powerful. And third, several critical computer capabilities became available around the same time: massive sets of data that AI systems could learn from, low-cost storage to handle all that data, and fast processors capable of handling the number-crunching that the most-common AI approaches require.

Communication Applications of AI

Thanks to these developments, AI is now being applied in virtually every functional area of business. Many of these applications involve business communication, including augmented writing, automated writing, emotion recognition, job applicant evaluation systems, chatbots and taskbots, robotic process automation, cognitive automation, voice recognition, real-time voice translation, and augmented ability systems. Here are a few specific examples:

  • Businesses use text mining for social listening—identifying themes (such as prevailing customer sentiment or threats to a company’s reputation) hidden in mountains of written information, from Twitter and Facebook posts to customer emails and surveys. The Clarabridge image shown above (click on the thumbnail for a larger version) illustrates the use of social listening in the hospitality industry.
  • The Textio augmented-writing system gives company recruiters real-time writing feedback while they draft job postings. By analyzing hundreds of millions of postings and comparing the candidate pools they attracted, the system is figuring out the most compelling way to describe job opportunities. Plus, the system can help writers avoid biased or exclusionary language by showing how various demographic groups respond to different word choices.
  • Any of your students who play fantasy football on Yahoo! Sports might be intrigued to know that the game summaries they receive each week are written by an AI system.

From a user’s perspective, AI-enhanced communication isn’t skills-based to the same degree as social media and mobile communication, but we believe it has become a vital topic to address in any well-rounded business communication course. In future posts, we’ll explore many of these applications and discuss how they are giving professionals powerful new tools to improve communication efficiency and effectiveness.

 

Adapted from Excellence in Business Communication, 13th Edition, Pearson, 2020.

Image: Courtesy Clarabridge

Free Video for Classroom Use: Communication Ethics: How to Make Good Choices When Your Choices Aren’t Clear

BT VideosHere is the sixth video in our new series that addresses a variety of specific communication challenges and offers practical advice that students can apply now in their coursework and take with them on the job.

This video gives students a four-step decision model to guide them in making ethical communication choices.

Instructor version (concludes with information about the Bovée & Thill business communication series, including links to order examination copies)

Student version (identical to the instructor version, except for the textbook information)

Free Video for Classroom Use: The Five Zones of Professional Etiquette

BT VideosHere is the fifth video in our new series that addresses a variety of specific communication challenges and offers practical advice that students can apply now in their coursework and take with them on the job.

This video helps students adapt their behavior to the five zones of professional etiquette: in the workplace, online, on the phone, in social settings, and while using mobile devices.

Instructor version (concludes with information about the Bovée & Thill business communication series, including links to order examination copies)

Student version (identical to the instructor version, except for the textbook information)

The Future of Communication: Haptic Technologies

This is the sixth post in a series about technologies that are shaping the future of communication. We’ve been following technologies that cover an interesting array of possibilities, from enhancing existing communication modes to replacing at least one of the humans in a conversation to assisting people who have a variety of motor, vision, and cognitive impairments. They are all across the adoption curve, from technologies that are already approaching mainstream usage (such as bots and gamification) to a few that are closer to the sci-fi end of things (such as holograms and telepathic communication). Many of these systems rely on artificial intelligence, which is reshaping business communication in some profound ways. All of them present interesting discussion topics for business communication, because they get to the heart of matter, which is trying to exchange information and meaning in the most effective and efficient ways possible. To offer students a peek into the future, we've started covering these innovations in our business communication texts, beginning with the 14th Edition of Business Communication Today (published January 2017) and the 8th Edition of Business Communication Essentials (published January 2018).

 

As the most intimate form of communication, touch can convey shades of emotion and meaning in ways that other forms can’t match. Think of the range of messages you can send by the way you greet someone, for example. A firm handshake, a light kiss on the cheek, an awkward embrace, and a fist bump all send different nonverbal signals.

Touch is a vital aspect of human-to-human and human-to-machine interaction, but it is missing from most forms of digital communication. You can’t give someone a hearty handshake over email or feel the vibration patterns of a machine while viewing it over a video link.

However, the field of haptic technology is enabling touch and tactile sensations in a growing number of ways. Mobile devices and wearables such as smartwatches are incorporating haptic input and output in ways that simulate the nuances of human touch or offer sensory substitution—using haptic feedback to translate visual or auditory information into vibration and pressure. When combined with virtual reality, haptics can create simulations so realistic they are being used to train surgeons and nuclear power plant technicians.

Beyond training, the technology has exciting potential in such diverse areas as retailing, maintenance and repair in dangerous environments, and assistive technologies. Imagine being able to feel the texture of fabric from halfway around the world or letting an expert’s hands remotely guide yours as you learn a new procedure. The ability to manipulate objects and machines through simulated touch, rather than abstracted devices such as joysticks, offers more subtle control and feedback. Haptic navigation systems can provide directions via vibration actuators in shoes or other wearable devices. Biometric yoga pants guide users into proper form and motion, and with haptic metronomes, musicians can literally feel the beat, without the potentially disruptive sound of a conventional metronome.

As sensors and actuators get smaller, cheaper, and more flexible, we’re likely to see haptics integrated into an even wider array of products and systems.

Class activity idea: Have students research the current state of haptic technology to identify one way in which the technology has the potential to change business communication practices, such as replacing detailed verbal descriptions of products with touch-enabled virtual interaction. Do they agree with the predictions the experts make? Why or why not?

 

Sources: Gregory Mone, “Feeling Sounds, Hearing Sights,” Communications of the ACM, January 2018, 15–17; Wearable X website, accessed 31 January 2018, www.wearablex.com; Andrew Wade, “Revolution in Touch,” The Engineer, September 2017, 22–24; Roland Moore-Colyer, “Good Vibrations: What’s Next for Haptics in Wearable Tech?” Wareable, 22 August 2016, www.wareable.com.

Image: Photo on Visual Hunt

 

The Future of Communication: The Internet of Things

This is the fifth post in a series about technologies that are shaping the future of communication. We’ve been following technologies that cover an interesting array of possibilities, from enhancing existing communication modes to replacing at least one of the humans in a conversation to assisting people who have a variety of motor, vision, and cognitive impairments. They are all across the adoption curve, from technologies that are already approaching mainstream usage (such as bots and gamification) to a few that are closer to the sci-fi end of things (such as holograms and telepathic communication). Many of these systems rely on artificial intelligence, which is reshaping business communication in some profound ways. All of them present interesting discussion topics for business communication, because they get to the heart of matter, which is trying to exchange information and meaning in the most effective and efficient ways possible. To offer students a peek into the future, we've started covering these innovations in our business communication texts, beginning with the 14th Edition of Business Communication Today (published January 2017) and the 8th Edition of Business Communication Essentials (published January 2018).

 

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the several billion devices now connected to the Internet and the networking potential of having all these gadgets communicate with each other, feed data into powerful analysis and control algorithms, and interact with people and the physical environment. These “things” range from simple sensors that measure temperature, location, and other parameters all the way up to robots and other complex systems. People and animals with Internet-capable sensors (such as implanted chips) or devices also qualify as things in this model.

Imagine you walk into a department store and your mobile phone automatically gives you directions to the aisle where you could find the clothing styles you have recently been browsing online or discussing in social media. When you reach that aisle, a coupon pops up on your phone with a discount on the specific items you’re considering. When you pull a garment off the rack, the store’s customer database checks other purchases you’ve made and suggests which items you already own that coordinate with this piece. If you could use an accessory to complete the outfit, the store’s computers can tell your phone just where to take you. And if you need more advice, you can text or talk—and possibly not know whether you’re conversing with a store employee or an automated chat algorithm.

Now imagine this simple concept expanded and applied in various ways to industrial facilities, agriculture, transportation, buildings, health care, and other systems. By relying on networked IoT devices for such communication functions as observing, measuring, and reporting, these enhanced systems can supplement or replace communication flows that were previously carried out by human participants. IoT raises some serious concerns about security and privacy, but it’s already a multitrillion-dollar industry that doesn't show any signs of slowing down.

IoT's impact on business communication will be fascinating to watch over the next few years, particularly as the technology gets linked with automated writing and other AI tools. Ideally, it will take over some routine communication tasks and give businesspeople more time for higher-level communication and strategizing.

Class activity idea: Have students research the current state of IoT innovation to identify one way in which the technology has the potential to change business communication practices, such as automated data collection and status reporting. Do they agree with the predictions the experts make? Why or why not?

 

Sources: Steve Ranger, “What Is the IoT? Everything You Need to Know About the Internet of Things Right Now,” ZDNet, 19 January 2018, www.xdnet.com; Bernard Marr, “The Internet of Things (IOT) Will Be Massive In 2018: Here Are the 4 Predictions From IBM,” Forbes, 4 January 2018, www.forbes.com.

Image: laboratoriolinux on VisualHunt.comCC BY-NC-SA

 

Free Video for Classroom Use: Balancing Emotional and Logical Appeals for Persuasive Messages

BT VideosHere is the fourth video in our new series that addresses a variety of specific communication challenges and offers practical advice that students can apply now in their coursework and take with them on the job.

This video helps students understand how to find the optimum balance of emotional and logical appeals when crafting persuasive messages. Few message appeals are entirely emotional or entirely logical, so knowing enough about the audience to mix the right blend of appeals is essential to creating effective persuasive messages for both internal and external audiences.

Instructor version (concludes with information about the Bovée & Thill business communication series, including links to order examination copies)

Student version (identical to the instructor version, except for the textbook information)

Free Video for Classroom Use: Do Your Visuals Tell the Truth?

BT VideosHere is the third video in our new series that addresses a variety of specific communication challenges and offers practical advice that students can apply now in their coursework and take with them on the job.

This video helps students understand the nuances of visual ethics and gives them a framework for making ethical choices when they create visuals for reports, presentations, and other communication projects.

Instructor version (concludes with information about the Bovée & Thill business communication series, including links to order examination copies)

Student version (identical to the instructor version, except for the textbook information)

 

 

The Future of Communication: Augmented Writing

TextioThis is the fourth post in a series about technologies that are shaping the future of communication. We’ve been following technologies that cover an interesting array of possibilities, from enhancing existing communication modes to replacing at least one of the humans in a conversation to assisting people who have a variety of motor, vision, and cognitive impairments. They are all across the adoption curve, from technologies that are already approaching mainstream usage (such as bots and gamification) to a few that are closer to the sci-fi end of things (such as holograms and telepathic communication). Many of these systems rely on artificial intelligence, which is reshaping business communication in some profound ways. All of them present interesting discussion topics for business communication, because they get to the heart of matter, which is trying to exchange information and meaning in the most effective and efficient ways possible. To offer students a peek into the future, we've started covering these innovations in our business communication texts, beginning with the 14th Edition of Business Communication Today, which launched in January 2017, and 8th Edition of Business Communication Essentials, which launches in January 2018.

 

What’s the best way to say this?

That’s a never-ending question for the typical business communicator. For just about anything beyond the simplest messages, we can never be entirely sure that we’ve found the most powerful words or crafted the most effective phrases. We have to send our missives out into the ether and hope we’ve done our best.

Moreover, in many cases, we get only one chance to hit the mark. In contrast to interactive conversations (in person or online), where we get instant feedback and can adjust the message if needed, a lot of business writing is a one-shot affair and we’ll never know if we’ve been as effective as we could be.

Digital tools have been assisting writers for decades, as far back as spell checkers that predate the PC era, but most haven’t done much beyond applying simple rules. However, recent advances in natural language processing show some potential to fill this feedback void by providing instantaneous advice about the effectiveness of our language.

For example, Textio’s augmented writing platform suggests words and phrases that it has determined to be more effective in a particular context. It does this by measuring the success of similar writing efforts and analyzing language choices that proved to be more or less effective.

Textio’s initial focus has been on helping companies write job postings that can attract more of the most desirable candidates. By analyzing hundreds of millions of postings and comparing the candidate pools that they attracted, the system is able to figure out the most compelling way to describe a variety of job opportunities.

Organizations ranging from Twitter to Apple to the National Basketball Association are now using the system to improve their job postings. HR departments enter their job descriptions into Textio’s predictive engine, which analyzes the text and suggests specific wording changes to attract target candidates. It also provides overall assessment points when it analyzes a posting, such as “Uses corporate clichés,” “Sentences are too short,” and “Contains too many questions,” all based on how other job descriptions have performed.

Textio’s clients are reporting success in terms of the number and quality of candidates they attract and how much faster they are able to fill job openings as a result. Plus, the system can help writers avoid biased or exclusionary language by showing how various demographic groups respond to different word choices.

Of course, a system like this relies on a large set of similar messages and the ability to measure the success of those messages, so it’s not a general-purpose solution that one can apply to every kind of business writing. But Textio and its clients are already trying the tool on sales emails and other types of recurring messages, so its use could expand.

You can take a look at the feedback Textio provides here.

As we develop our upcoming editions, we’re studying augmented writing and a variety of other AI-driven innovations, and we look forward to sharing more of these fascinating developments.

 

Sources: Textio website; “How Textio Is Changing Writing as We Know It,” Scale Venture Partners, www.scalevp.com; Rachel Lerman, “Investors Pump $20M into Seattle Startup Textio, Which Helps Job Recruiters Find the Right Words,” Seattle Times, 25 June 2017.

Image: Textio website

1.81k