Text Clustering Real-World Applications: Examples

How often have you wondered about the vast amounts of unstructured data around us and its untapped potential? How can businesses sift through thousands of customer reviews, documents, or feedback to derive actionable insights? What if there was a way to automatically group similar pieces of text, helping organizations quickly identify patterns and trends?

Enter text clustering. A subset of text analytics, text clustering is an unsupervised machine learning task that divides a set of texts into clusters or groups. This ensures that texts in the same group are more similar to each other than to those in other groups. A powerful tool for deciphering insights from unstructured data, text clustering has found its way into a plethora of sectors, offering a myriad of benefits.

From customer reviews to medical records, the applications of text clustering span a broad range of sectors. In previous blogs, we explored the foundational steps, algorithms, and even methods to discern topics within these clusters using Python (Text Clustering Python Examples and Find Topics of Text Clustering). In this blog, let’s do a deep dive into its real-world applications across diverse domains. We will continue to add new business domains from time to time.

Text Clustering Applications in Banking

The banking sector, being an integral part of the global economy, constantly deals with vast amounts of textual data. From transaction descriptions to customer feedback, the sheer volume of text can be overwhelming. To navigate this sea of information, banks are increasingly turning to text clustering. Let’s delve deeper into how text clustering is revolutionizing two primary areas within banking:

Customer Feedback Analysis

Every day, banks are inundated with a deluge of feedback from their vast customer base. This feedback, which ranges from praises to grievances, offers a goldmine of insights that can significantly enhance customer experience and operational efficiency.

How does text clustering help?

• Issues categorization: Through text clustering, banks can automatically categorize feedback into relevant groups such as ‘service quality,’ ‘online banking issues,’ ‘loan queries,’ and more. This automated classification can be much more efficient than manual sorting, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. You can form teams to tackle one or more of such issues. Regular text clustering and help in merging of existing teams and creation of new teams to tackle newer issues.
• Issues prioritization: Once categorized, it’s easier for banks to prioritize which issues to address first. For example, if a specific cluster like ‘online banking issues’ suddenly sees a spike, it could indicate a systemic problem that needs immediate attention.
• Issues trend analysis: Over time, analyzing the size and nature of these clusters can help banks identify trends in customer feedback, guiding strategic decisions and improvements.

Document Management through Text Clustering

Banks handle a vast array of documents, including loan applications, KYC forms, account opening documents, transaction statements, and more. Managing and retrieving these documents efficiently is crucial for both customer service and operational effectiveness. One of the popular use cases is automated document categorization. How does the text categorization help?

• Dynamic Sorting: Banks can utilize text clustering to automatically sort incoming documents into predefined categories. For instance, all documents related to home loans, personal loans, or credit card applications can be grouped into separate clusters.
• Efficient Retrieval: With documents clustered by their content, banks can ensure quicker retrieval. For example, if an employee needs all documents related to a specific type of loan, they can directly access the relevant cluster instead of sifting through a mixed pile.

Text Clustering Applications in Healthcare

The healthcare sector, one of the most critical pillars of society, is continually evolving with advances in technology and research. Amidst this evolution, the sector generates vast amounts of text data, from research papers to patient records. Text clustering, with its ability to group similar data, offers immense potential in harnessing this vast data for meaningful insights. Let’s explore some of the use cases related to text clustering:

Medical Research

The sheer volume of medical research being published globally is staggering. Every day, new studies, clinical trials, and research papers contribute to our understanding of diseases, treatments, and healthcare dynamics.

How can text clustering assist?

• Discovery of Trends: By clustering research papers based on their content, researchers can quickly identify emerging trends in a particular domain, be it oncology, neurology, or any other field. This can help in directing future research endeavors more effectively.
• Highlighting Potential Treatments: Clustering can group together studies focusing on similar treatments or drugs. This consolidation can accelerate the discovery of new or more effective treatments, especially when combined with meta-analysis.
• Predicting Health Threats: By analyzing clusters of research papers, potential epidemics or health crises can be foreseen. For instance, a sudden surge in papers discussing a specific virus strain might indicate its rising prevalence and the need for immediate action.

Patient Records Analysis

Patient records contain details of symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes. Analyzing this data can offer invaluable insights for patient care.

What role does text clustering play?

• Symptom Grouping: By clustering patient records, healthcare professionals can identify sets of symptoms that frequently occur together. This can be instrumental in diagnosing diseases that might otherwise be overlooked.
• Treatment Efficacy Analysis: Clustering patient records based on treatments can help in evaluating effectiveness of the treatments. For instance, if patients receiving a particular treatment consistently show better recovery rates, that treatment can be prioritized.
• Disease Outbreak Monitoring: Clustering can also help in monitoring potential disease outbreaks. If many patient records from a specific region show similar symptoms in a short period, it could indicate the beginning of an outbreak, prompting immediate medical intervention.
• Personalized Medicine: With the rise of personalized medicine, clustering patient records can help healthcare professionals understand patterns in patient responses to treatments based on genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors. This can pave the way for more tailored treatment approaches.

Conclusion

In this information age, the power to decipher patterns, trends, and insights from vast textual data is invaluable. Text clustering, as we’ve explored, is a great machine learning / AI tool with tangible, real-world applications across different business sectors. From enhancing customer experiences in banking to pioneering breakthroughs in healthcare, it’s clear that text clustering is paving the way for a more organized, insightful, and efficient future. As we continue to generate and access more textual data, the potential of this technology will only grow, promising innovations and solutions that we might have once deemed impossible.