User:PSRI JP/sandbox

Overview
Texifter, LLC is a company offering the web-based products DiscoverText, a software tool for textual data collection and analysis and an additional tool, Sifter, which provides access to the Gnip historical archive of Twitter tweets.

History
Texifter, LLC is a spin-out company based on text mining research conducted by Dr. Stuart Shulman. Dr. Shulman previously worked primarily in the domain of U.S. federal government electronic rulemaking, with a specific focus on the development of human language tools for reviewing large numbers of public comments about proposed regulations.

DiscoverText
DiscoverText provides cloud-based text analytics software tools to analyze and evaluate large amounts of data, including unstructured text, survey results, blog posts, and social media messages. It then uses machine learning classifiers to recognize text and social media data that the user considers relevant.

Using Gnip PowerTrack for Twitter, DiscoverText provides access to the full Twitter firehose for analysis and research. Rules can be created to narrow search results to tweets containing (or lacking) specific search criteria, such as language, geographic location (geocoding), and the user’s bio information such as their URL and number of followers.

Multilingual data can be imported from various sources or APIs, including Twitter, SurveyMonkey, RSS, spreadsheets, XML files, and text files.

Sifter
A companion product, Sifter, performs a similar function, but can search for and retrieve any undeleted tweet since the beginning of Twitter.

Use in research studies
DiscoverText has been used by researchers for several social media measurement studies, including analyzing the sentiments of Twitter messages to evaluate public opinion regarding the performance of the Brazilian government and the effectiveness of tweets about HIV prevention. In 2012, the National Library of Norway evaluated DiscoverText as a means to preserve Twitter posts for posterity.

Patent and federal supply schedule
On March 1, 2016, Texifter, LLC was granted a US patent for its “systems and methods… for machine classifiers that employ enhanced machine learning.”

DiscoverText and Sifter are on the US General Services Administration (GSA) federal supply schedule.

Competition
With the rise of social media, many researchers, government officials, and company marketing departments look for tools available from multiple vendors to automate their data mining and sentiment analysis efforts. As a result, Texifter participates in a marketplace with several text mining software tools.