MapIntel: Enhancing Competitive Intelligence Acquisition Through Embeddings and Visual Analytics

Competitive Intelligence allows an organization to keep up with market trends and foresee business opportunities. This practice is mainly performed by analysts scanning for any piece of valuable information in a myriad of dispersed and unstructured sources. Here we present MapIntel, a system for acquiring intelligence from vast collections of text data by representing each document as a multidimensional vector that captures its own semantics. The system is designed to handle complex Natural Language queries and visual exploration of the corpus, potentially aiding overburdened analysts in finding meaningful insights to help decision-making. The system searching module uses a retriever and reranker engine that first finds the closest neighbors to the query embedding and then sifts the results through a cross-encoder model that identifies the most relevant documents. The browsing module also leverages the embeddings by projecting them onto two dimensions while preserving the original landscape, resulting in a map where semantically related documents form topical clusters which we capture using topic modeling. This map aims at promoting a fast overview of the corpus while allowing a more detailed exploration and interactive information encountering process. In this work, we evaluate the system and its components on the 20 newsgroups dataset and demonstrate the superiority of Transformer-based components.