Text analytics and big data analysis can sound like scary terms, but they’re really an integral part of our national security. Here’s all you ever wanted to know about how text mining, geotagging, name matching, and other big data analysis are important for keeping us safe:

• Text analytics are important to border security. Text analytics is a form of big data analysis that takes unstructured data and converts it into structured data that can be analyzed for things like sentiment analysis and topic tagging. This allows people trying to make a decision about someone to make it more quickly. Text analytics allows border security to identify dangers near the border at the time of screening, to flag potential dangers that will need to be followed up later, and to pool information that can forecast future issues.
• Text mining can protect businesses. There are four steps to mining text. The information must be retrieved, and then processed by natural language processing software. Then relevant information is extracted and data is mined, or taken from it. This kind of big data analysis is critical for business because it allows them to detect risks and threats as well as to monitor compliance. In an age where bad actors everywhere seek access to America’s business technology and information–both to get ahead for themselves, and, more seriously, to undermine American interests–text mining can provide protection and give early warning when problems arise.
• This kind of big data analysis is needed. The old ways of protecting ourselves are simply not enough in the digital age. Enormous amounts of information are created every second. The International Data Corporation estimates that 1.7 MB of new information is created for every human being every second of every day, and by 2020 will be 40 ZB in size. It is impossible for humans to physically analyze all this data for threats and risk. Currently, only about 1% of data is ever analyzed at all, according to the IDC. Data analysis software such as text mining is crucial to bridging this gap.
  Consider not only the amount of information created, but the need for entity resolution, as well. This is finding mentions of the same entity within or across a variety of data sets, and has to be done to avoid unnecessary duplication and provide accurate record linkage.

Social media data analysis, text mining, and other kinds of big data analysis are crucial to the modern task of providing safety and security for people and businesses in a digital, and digitally linked, world.