Andrew Nusca of ZDnet recently interviewed MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson about his company’s use of machine learning. Nusca writes, “When I last wrote about MindTouch, the San Diego-based company, I mentioned that there was a lot of money on the line—$83 billion, according to one market estimate—to get customer service right. MindTouch’s latest gambit? Machine learning. Read more

What’s next in sentiment analytics? The road’s pointing to a deeper understanding of emotions.

“We still are clearly at the nascent level regarding text and sentiment analytics,” said David Rabjohns, CEO of social intelligence company MotiveQuest, speaking at yesterday’s Sentiment Analysis Symposium, the event organized by Seth Grimes’ Alta Plana Corp. “There are much higher levels of emotional depth still to be mined.”

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – May 7, 2013) - Topsy, the real-time social analytics company, today announced that users can now act immediately on insights they uncover in their analysis by engaging directly with their audience through Topsy Pro.

Topsy Pro already gives users the best way to spot trends, track sentiment, and identify key influencers relevant to their business; Topsy’s new functionality allows users to also reply, retweet or favorite key Tweets surfaced in an analysis. Topsy Pro customers can use these features to react in seconds to emerging PR crises, find and promote the most viral content, identify and engage with local customers and generally be one click away from taking action the minute they see an opportunity. Read more

Matthew Syrett of PBS Media Shift recently shared his thoughts on the flaws of Facebook’s graph search. He writes, “With Graph Search, Facebook intends to mine our social networks to unlock knowledge stored among our online friends to create a recommendation search engine. Instead of crawling the Internet to build search indices, Graph Search will use our social media connections, likes, and Check-ins to make search indices to respond to our queries. Using Graph Search, we should be able to find restaurants that have been checked into or liked by our Facebook friends. We can discover movies based upon the likes of our connections, or relevant music. The project strives to be an alternative to everyday search queries we all do to discover things to do or get in our lives — all validated by people we know and trust, and not by unknown reviewers or a faceless algorithm.” Read more

Centurion, South Africa (PRWEB) April 26, 2013 — Gatfol serves base technology to provide digital devices with the ability to process human natural language efficiently.

The goal of truly semantic search has not yet fully been realized. The main problem is the enormity of ambiguous word permutations of semantic equivalence in even the simplest of phrases, which up to now has processing-wise required huge structured lexicons and ontologies as guides. Read more

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Geni.com, the leader in collaborative family history, today announced the release of two major new features, Record Matching and Smart Matching™, which enrich family trees with relevant historical records and help users discover unknown relatives and ancestors, respectively. This will add significant new detail and color to the World Family Tree, a global initiative by Geni.com that shows how everyone in the world is related, and will help members learn more about their shared ancestries. Read more

Rado Kotorov of Venture Beat reports, “Many people delegate more and more to Siri (the electronic genie ‘in’ the iPhone) – from dialing phone numbers and finding directions, to taking dictation for SMS and emails. What if Siri could help us modulate the emotional tone of our messages? Would it make the world a better place with less conflict and argument, or would it leave piles of unread messages? Perhaps, but to be able to help in this aspect Siri will have to learn to do sentiment analysis: read text and determine its emotional charge.” Read more

Rachel Metz of Technology Review reports, “Nuance is today announcing Voice Ads, a platform that will let companies create ads that people can talk to on smartphones and tablets. Mike McSherry, vice president of advertising and content at Nuance, says these could range from car ads that let you ask questions about the vehicle shown to ads for a sports network that allow you to get information about who won last night’s game or what time tonight’s game starts. The company has lined up partnerships with several ad agencies including Digitas, OMD, and Leo Burnett, as well as with mobile ad distribution networks JumpTap, Millennial Media, and Ad Marvel.” Read more

A new release out of Indiana University reports, “Two researchers at Indiana University Bloomington’s School of Informatics and Computing have each been awarded the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award in support of early career development. Assistant professors Apu Kapadia and David Crandall have each received NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program award designed to assist early stage scientists in building a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education. In receiving NSF’s CAREER Award, the two researcher-teachers are recognized for their work to ‘most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of Indiana University’.” Read more

Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land reports, “Yahoo and Jybe announced that the latter was being acquired by the former. Jybe, which I had not heard of previously, is described by Yahoo as ‘a personalized recommendation company founded with the vision to help people find the things they love to do based on what’s trending in their social circles.’ It sounds like a ‘social search’ or ‘social discovery’ app. Indeed, all five Jybe team members are former search people — and former Yahoo employees: ‘As part of this acquisition, we’re welcoming an extremely talented group of engineers and data scientists who will join Yahoo!’s platform organization, focused on targeting and personalization. This will be a ‘coming home’ for the team — all five are former Yahoos. Arnab Bhattacharjee was the VP of Yahoo!’” Read more