The Blacklist is a feature that allows you to hide inconsequential text mining results from your analysis, allowing you to identify actionable insights more easily. These inconsequential results are often referred to as noise. Using the Blacklist is completely optional, you can conduct a full analysis without using this feature.

Noise is a subjective concept. Some people may want to only get rid of obvious noise such as greetings "good morning" and "Merry Christmas" for example. Others may want to get rid of general statements to surface the "why" something is happening. Read on for clarification...

Let's say your dataset is made up of customer complaints about an automobile manufacturer. The complaints are not submitted directly from the clients to the manufacturer, but rather they are taken by dealerships and then submitted internally to the manufacturer.

In this case, you will certainly get many Comments indicating the dissatisfaction of the client. For example:

“The client is unhappy”

“The customer is frustrated”

These Comments can be considered noise because there are no actionable or meaningful insights in these comments. We already know the customer is unhappy, hence why this Comment is in the Complaint database.

What we are interested in is the reason why the customer is unhappy. 

For example, the Comment “the tires are not covered by the warranty”, gives you specific information about why the customer is unhappy and is a more valuable insight.

You can hide inconsequential Comments—thereby getting rid of the noise—so that the far more revealing Comments rise to the top of the Comments page.

It is important to note you can only backlist Comments, not Topics or Opinions. This is to prevent you from accidentally hiding too much data.

The Blacklist is accessible advanced filters in the filter panel. 

Blacklists are organization wide, meaning all users working in the same Organization will share the same Blacklist.

Be careful! If you blacklist a result, it is blacklisted for everyone who has access to the Organization. Any new data added to the organization containing the Topic and Opinion paring will also be added to the Blacklist.

The Comments in the Blacklist are displayed exactly the same as the All Comments page.

To add a Comment to the Blacklist, check the box to the left of the chosen Comment and then select the “Hide” button. The selected Comments will disappear from your All Comments page and reappear in your Blacklist. You can hide multiple Comments at the same time if you choose.

Please note that Filters will not be taken into account when backlisting Comments. For example, if you have applied a Filter for a specific time period and you blacklist a Comment listed in the results, it will be hidden for all time periods, not only the time period isolated by your Filter.

To remove Comments from the Blacklist individually, check the box beside the Comment(s) you want to unhide and then select the Unhide button. They will disappear from the Blacklist and will return to the All Comments page.