{"id":51949,"date":"2018-06-20T14:23:59","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T18:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=51949"},"modified":"2019-04-22T11:40:57","modified_gmt":"2019-04-22T15:40:57","slug":"brock-and-niagara-data-analytics-company-receive-funding-for-text-mining-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2018\/06\/brock-and-niagara-data-analytics-company-receive-funding-for-text-mining-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Brock and Niagara data analytics company receive funding for text mining research"},"content":{"rendered":"

When scrolling through your social media feed, it\u2019s not uncommon to come across an ad for a restaurant in your area, a service you\u2019ve inquired about or a store you recently made an online purchase from.<\/span><\/p>\n

Targeted advertising is a powerful tool in business, one that Brock University researchers hope to strengthen through a new partnership with rel8ed.to<\/span><\/a>, a Niagara-based data analytics company.<\/span><\/p>\n

Brock\u2019s Goodman School of Business is working with <\/span>rel8ed.to<\/span> to research how artificial intelligence can be used to create more effective ways of targeting advertisements to potential customers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last year, Social Sciences student Val\u00e9rie Plante-Brisebois and Brock MBA graduate Pari Borah\u00a0<\/span>(MBA ’16)\u00a0<\/span>built and tested an automated system to scan social media postings for keywords and phrases to identify users\u2019 interests and activities.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do is to take this \u2018Val bot\u2019 and make it super strong so it exceeds any method a human can come up with,\u201d says rel8ed.to\u2019s Managing Director Drew Fones.<\/span><\/p>\n

The company and Brock will now be able to advance their Val-bot, named after one of the student researchers, and other text mining techniques thanks to research grants from the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOCE\u2019s support is a recognition that our rigorous work and techniques have an immediate impact in the business community,\u201d says Anteneh Ayanso, Professor of Information Systems and Director of Brock\u2019s <\/span>Centre for Business Analytics<\/span><\/a>. Ayanso is the lead researcher on the project, titled \u201cEfficient Strategies and Analytics Solutions for Social Media Targeting via Text Mining.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Currently, social media targeted advertising draws upon what Ayanso refers to as \u201cstructured data,\u201d information that includes where potential customers live, work, their gender and some aspects of their lifestyles.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unstructured data, on the other hand, can be found in \u201ccommon-day\u201d conversations and customer reviews that reveal people\u2019s travel plans, their ideas, likes, dislikes, preferences and other information.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe social media environment is contextual and dynamic,\u201d Ayanso says. \u201cIf we combine the structured data with unstructured data, we can have a huge impact on and accuracy in the way we identify market opportunities and the right customer group for any given product or service.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The researchers are taking this concept one step further.<\/span><\/p>\n

The targeted advertising process is currently controlled by people who select keywords based on their knowledge of the audience they are trying to reach, a method Fones calls \u201chighly subjective.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He says the new, self-learning automated system being devised uses \u201ctext mining\u201d techniques and specialized algorithms to create those keywords more quickly and precisely than human effort.<\/span> Text mining<\/span><\/a> analyzes data in natural, unstructured communication such as what occurs on social media.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt will be developed as an end-to-end system wherein eventually, for any given ad content, keyword selection, demographics targeting and ad creation are all automated,\u201d says Fones.<\/span><\/p>\n

Results so far are encouraging.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe first time we tested the Val-bot, the human (Plante-Brisebois) did better, debating which keywords are better and selecting them accordingly,\u201d recalls Fones.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe next time, a few modifications were made to the machine; the results from the human and the machine were tied. The next iteration, the Val-bot did slightly better than the human.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The purpose of the grant is to formalize this system, advance it and take it to market.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tek Thongpapanl, Associate Dean of Brock\u2019s Goodman School of Business, lauds the Brock-rel8ed.to research partnership, which will employ a graduate student and undergraduate student from the University.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe partnership\u2019s pooled resources advance the understanding of shared challenges, making it possible to address the multifaceted nature of these challenges,\u201d he says. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMore importantly, by involving our trained graduate students in these collaborations, we ensure that the country\u2019s future generations of talent experience the shared challenges first-hand, and are involved in addressing them at the outset.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Brock-rel8ed.to partnership grant includes $25,000 from NSERC-Engage, $20,000 from Ontario Centres of Excellence on behalf of the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science, and contributions from<\/span> rel8ed.to<\/span> in the amounts of $5,000 cash and $30,700 in-kind. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When scrolling through your social media feed, it\u2019s not uncommon to come across an ad for a restaurant in your area, service you\u2019ve inquired about or a store you recently made an online purchase from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":51951,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,7,3319,4052,1,4,5],"tags":[4166,7830,4303,5800,6769,6772,594,2195,944,6771,3029,6770],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51949"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51949"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51971,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51949\/revisions\/51971"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}