It's no secret that the world has seen an explosion of information in the past 15 years, an explosion that experts predict will continue as the millions of people who use online resources continue to expand their usage, and the millions of people who do not yet have access to such resources gain it. Similarly, information stored as text in both business and government organizations has grown exponentially.

This paper briefly defines text analytics, describes various approaches to text analytics, and then focuses on the natural language processing techniques used by SPSS Inc.'s text analytics solutions. It concludes with descriptions of SPSS solutions for text analytics and their role in predictive analytics.