Microsoft snaps up text analysis service Equivio

Managing legal and compliance requirements may become a little easier for  Windows users, with Microsoft acquiring text analysis service Equivio.

The software giant said it plans to incorporate the technology, which uses machine-learning techniques to identify documents relevant to the legal and compliance needs of users, into its Office 365 offering.

“We are making this acquisition to help our customers tackle the legal and compliance challenges inherent in managing large quantities of email and documents,” said Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president of Outlook and Office 365, in a blog post.

“Businesses and governments around the world generate enormous volumes of data every day. Sifting through that data to find what is relevant to a legal or compliance matter is costly and time consuming.”

Equivio allows users to explore large, unstructured sets of data and quickly find what is relevant, according to Jha.

“It uses advanced text analytics to perform multi-dimensional analyses of data collections, intelligently sorting documents into themes, grouping near-duplicates, isolating unique data, and helping users quickly identify the documents they need,” he said.

Users are able to train the system to identify documents relevant to a particular subject, such as a legal case or investigation. US federal agencies, law firms, corporations and other organisations already use the tool.