Applying Text Mining on Electronic Messages for Competitive Intelligence

This paper presents how text -mining techniques can be used to analyze an enterprise’s external environment searching for competitors, related products and services, marketing strategies and customers’ opinions. A case study, using the UNCTAD Electronic Trading Opportunities (ETO) System, is presented. The ETO system enables “Trade Points” and trade-related bodies to exchange information by e-mail, offering an enormous trade potential and opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises. As the efficiency of the ETO System is limited, since the volume of circulating messages is very large and the selection and manipulation of this amount of messages surpasses the human analytical limit, we use text -mining tools to support the process. The described strategy uses domain knowledge to extract concepts from the texts. After the concepts are extracted, a mining tool searches for patterns in concept distributions and correlations. Many kinds of analyses can be performed on the resulting patterns to identify strategic information for Competitive Intelligence. Cases and experiments are presented to discuss the proposed strategy and to demonstrate its application in CI processes. The main contribution of the related work is the use of an inexpensive strategy to allow competitive advantages to small and medium enterprises at minimal costs.