There are (occasionally!) some good questions and conversations going on within some of the LinkedIn groups. One recently was around what use cases there are for unstructured data within banking and finance, and I found this comment from Tom Deutsch of IBM to be quite insightful and elegant (at least better than I could I have written it…) on what the main types of unstructured data analysis there are:

• Listening for the first time 
• Listening better 
• Adding context 

Listening for the first time is really just making use of what you already probably capture to hear what is being said (or navigated) 

Listening better is making sure you are actually both hearing and understanding what is being said. This is sometimes non-trivial as it involves accuracy issues and true (not marketing hype) NLP technologies and integrating multiple sources of information 

Adding context is when you either add structured data to the above or add the above to structured data, usually to round out or more fully inform models (or sometimes just build new ones).