sentiment analysis…where the action is

I recently read a post by Curt Monash at Text Technologies about the applicability of semantic technologies that got me thinking. His list emphasized areas where semantic search has potential: i.e. transactional, enterprise, and public-facing site search. Semantic search is a form of knowledge mining and extraction. The idea is that when you search for something on a complex site, you get more accurate results and even context for the subject you’re searching for. Semantic search is dependent on metadata such as tagged entities (people, places, items) and the relationships between them.

Initially, you need to analyze unstructured text (in ecommerce sites, company databases, and university websites for example) for entities, facts, and events. These entities are tagged, along with facts (Elena Haliczer: COO) and events (Recession: Layoffs). This whole process requires a significant corpus of unstructured text, which is why some initial stabs at semantic search engines are trained with Wikipedia text.

Think about it. Wikipedia is a huge connected textual database created by humans making human connections between entries. It’s perfect if you want to develop a search engine that “thinks” (or at least extracts connections) like a human. Cool right?

Curt emphasizes search in his list because so many sites need improved search and semantic technologies have a lot of scope there. However, he also says “the action is in sentiment analysis” and that’s where I actually get excited. When you’re successfully mining unstructured text for sentiment, you can apply this knowledge to simplify complex business practices and make better business decisions.

For example, we’ve trained JuLiA to recognize sentiment in user-generated content. Publishers can use this knowledge to simplify and even automate their moderation process according to their editorial policies.

There are a lot of other applications for sentiment analysis. My own applications list would include online reputation management, trend and buzz analysis, customer satisfaction, and national security threat monitoring and management. That’s where the heart of our business (and the real action) is at.