I'd welcome your attending the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, which I run. Text analytics is well represented but not the only topic -- I usually try to cover crowd sourcing, speech/video analysis, and emerging technologies (e.g., live polling at the next symposium, which is May 8 in New York) -- and the main symposium day is applications focused. I'm also the founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit, next up June 5-6 Boston. I don't own that conference, but I can tell you that we're working to infuse more forward-looking content in the program, to help attendees stay on the forward edge of the tech curve. I've never attended Text Analytics World, but I know chair Tom Reamy, and he and the parent conference, Predictive Analysis World, have a very SAS-y mind-set although from what I've heard, TAW is about half the size (around 70 attendees at the last one) of the sentiment symposium (160 expected in NY) or the TAS (I'm guessing about the same) with fewer vendors represented. If you're into taxonomy and content management, KMWorld could be a good conference for you. But for text analytics, it and linked conferences (Enterprise Search Summit, Taxonomy Bootcamp, the Sharepoint conference) offer little of interest. Lastly, if you're interested in technical approaches to harvesting social media, check out the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) in July in Boston. It has a lot of academic/research participation.
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