As a friendly competitor with Seth, I, not surprisingly, have a slightly different perspective. And as program chair for TAW, I’m somewhat biased, but the conference in Boston that Julia attended was my first as program chair and while as Seth notes, it was small, hopefully the upcoming conference in San Francisco, April 17-18 will be larger. The focus of the conference is to cover the full spectrum of text analytics rather than the social media/sentiment analysis focus on TAS (at least that has been the focus for the ones that I was at). As far as being “SAS-y”, that is probably partially the result of my long association with SAS although my company also has been partnering with other text analytics companies like Smart Logic, Concept Searching, and Expert Systems. I would also somewhat disagree about Taxonomy Boot Camp and Enterprise Search Summit as of little interest to text analytics people, although certainly KMWorld has very little text analytics. Theother two have been slightly increasing their text analytics coverage – enough so I’m not the only text analytics speaker which I’ve been for a couple of years. For example, one last shameless plug –I’ve giving a three hour workshop on text analytics at Enterprise Search Summit in New York this May. In addition, SemTech is an interesting conference that touches on text analytics tangentially although the focus is on the semantic web. They have a conference in San Francisco in June and while text analytics is a minor part, they are quite large with about 800 people last time.
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