Enriching data with AI
Power Query also includes ways to enhance data using AI services from Microsoft. These features integrate with Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and require a Power BI Premium capacity or per-user license. The options for AI Insights include the following:
- Language detection
- Key phrase extraction
- Sentiment analysis
- Image tagging
Let’s consider why each of these would be useful.
Language detection
When data contains free-text fields, and we want to use those in analysis, it’s important to first ensure we know the language used in the text. The accuracy and usability of subsequent text analysis are enhanced when the language of a given text block is known. AI Insights provides capabilities to detect language and it is recommended to start with language detection before performing key phrase extraction or sentiment analysis. AI Insights can detect up to 120 languages and returns both the name of the language as well as the ISO code of the identified language. For example, the ISO code of the English language is “en.”
Key phrase extraction
When analyzing text, especially larger-sized groupings of text, it’s valuable to shorten or break down the key phrases from that text to better understand it. For example, if we have the sentence “Well!” thought Alice to herself, “after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling downstairs!” from Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland we can see that the key phrases or keywords are tumbling, stairs, Alice, and fall.
Key phrase extraction is useful for categorizing text. For example, if there are multiple customer surveys that contain the same key phrases or keywords, then it’s possible that multiple customers are commenting on the same topic or idea. This makes it easier to identify the most important topics from a customer survey based on the contents of a free-text field in the data. This analysis can be reliably completed by the AI Insights capability without having to rely on a human to read each survey response and manually come up with the keywords.