Northern Light has unveiled the first automated “meaning extraction” application designed specifically for market intelligence and market research. The company says MI Analyst combines free-text searching with text analytics, dramatically speeding and enhancing a researcher’s ability to analyze reports from internal and external sources, identifying the strategy issues and suggesting the business implications of the analyzed content.

Northern Light reports MI Analyst adds value by extracting meaning from search results and mining market research content for relevant competitive intelligence and market trends. Further, it can read all the market intelligence reports and articles a company creates or licenses from third-party sources. The application then can tell the researcher what is in the documents, suggest what business issues they address, and direct the researcher to the documents that are most interesting based on their meaning, rather than on their statistically derived search relevance.

The company says its new application can also assess the tone of content; additionally, it identifies business-critical facets of searched content, including companies, venture-funded companies, technologies, markets, job titles, business issues, government agencies, identified phrases and market research vendors.

MI Analyst is available as an option for its SinglePoint enterprise market research portal.