SAS has purchased Teragram, a natural language processing (NLP) software vendor, in a bid to boost its existing technologies for text mining and business intelligence.
NLP seeks to derive patterns and meaning from language, which is unstructured information.
"We've been watching the unstructured space for a while, just seeing the trends everyone else is seeing with more textual data being amassed," says SAS spokesowman Anne Milley. "Effectively, we were looking at how can we have more natural language processing capabilities that we can leverage across our whole platform."
SAS has had text-mining technologies for a while, but the company saw the "need for leveraging natural language processing virtually at every step," she says.