Photo Courtesy: Flickr/katerha

Among the topics covered at this week’s Sentiment Analysis’ Symposium was an exploration of just how much the negative or positive expression of sentiment about a company or a product really matters – and in what context it does. (Another one, which The Semantic Web Blog covered yesterday here, looked at the expected transition from sentiment to emotions analytics.)

Augie Ray, director of social media at Prudential Financial, and formerly a social media leader at USAA and Forrester, recounted some of the bigger blow-ups online in recent years: The passenger whose guitar was broken by United Airlines and made a Youtube video that went viral; NBC’s 2012 London Olympics coverage that was criticized for dissing a tribute to the victims of terrorist bombings, among other things; and Bank of America’s being castigated for its announced plan to institute debit card fees.

“We live and die by the concept that negative sentiment matters,” he said.

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.”

Read more

Swipp, which in January launched its social intelligence platform and consumer social networking app (see our story here), today follows through on the plans it alluded to then of letting businesses leverage its technology for merging social and knowledge streams. Structured data is at the heart of the Swipp platform, with the Freebase entity graph providing reference knowledge and context for topics; its value propositions are that comments are tied to a specific, exact topic and that it creates a real-time Index for users’ social data sentiment scores for each topic that can be combined and sorted by geography, time, gender, and age.

The new Swipp Plus tool suite, the company says, draws on its social intelligence platform to prepare businesses – from consumer brands to content providers – to better connect with customers on today’s social web. Swipp Plus now enables them to leverage capabilities in its platform to add a Swipp widget to their web sites, blogs, maps, QR codes, and various online arenas around pieces of content, particular products, or concepts, and it also is working to build out mobile capabilities for direct feedback.

Read more

Image Courtesy: Flickr/misterbisson

Ever heard of Big Language? It’s a Big Data-affiliated term coined by customer experience management company SDL, to describe the challenge faced by the text analytics software community whose global customers want more in the way of supported languages.

“Text analytics is all about language, and the game is changing for translation,” says Brian Otis, vice president, Business Development, SDL Language Technologies. “If you look at all the user-generated content on the web, it’s not feasible to rely on human translation, even for many big companies. Machine language translation is the only economic and time-to-market and sane way to go.”

The vendor this week offers up its machine translation solution, SDL BeGlobal, as an integration option for text analytics software providers, so that they can keep up with more demands from global customers that want to understand what’s being said about them by customers in whatever language it’s being said, without busting their R&D budgets on fulfilling expectations for expanded language support.

Read more

Sunday night’s the big stroll down the red carpet for Hollywood’s elite — for the 85th time. But no need to wait until then to have some fun with old Oscar.

Some services with semantics and sentiment analytics in their genes have already begun. Here are a few examples:

Jinni, the semantic movie and TV Taste engine, has created a detail-filled graphic, based on analysis and cross-referencing it did according to its own Jinni Entertainment Genome (see its blog post here for a look at the entire graphic and more info on its creation):

Read more

A new report from Hurwitz & Associates seeks to put text analytics vendors in context. In an environment where unstructured text accounts for 80 percent of the data available to companies, the market analyst and research firm has prepared a Victory Index to help companies suss out who can best help them get value from this information.

By providing the ability to analyze unstructured text, extract relevant information, and transform it into structured information, “text analytics has become a key component of a highly competitive company’s analytics arsenal,” write report authors Fern Halper, partner and principal analyst; Marcia Kaufman, COO and principal analyst; and Daniel Kirsh, senior analyst. Often, the research firm notes, companies begin to experiment with text analytics to gain insight into the unstructured text that abounds in social media, and from that move on to other use cases. For instance, they’ll discover value in mining unstructured data and using it with structured data to improve predictive models.

Read more

Courtesy: Flickr/zoetnet

As we close out 2012, we’ve asked some semantic tech experts to give us their take on the year that was. Was Big Data a boon for the semantic web, or is the opportunity to capitalize on the connection still pending? Is structured data on the web not just the future but the present? What sector is taking a strong lead in the semantic web space?

We begin with Part 1, with our experts listed in alphabetical order:

John Breslin, lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider:
I think the schema.org initiative really gaining community support and a broader range of terms has been fantastic. It’s been great to see an easily understandable set of terms for describing the objects in web pages, but also leveraging the experience of work like GoodRelations rather than ignoring what has gone before. It’s also been encouraging to see the growth of Drupal 7 (which produces RDFa data) in the government sector: Estimates are that 24 percent of .gov CMS sites are now powered by Drupal.

Martin Böhringer, CEO & Co-Founder Hojoki:

For us it was very important to see Jena, our Semantic Web framework, becoming an Apache top-level project in April 2012. We see a lot of development pace in this project recently and see a chance to build an open source Semantic Web foundation which can handle cutting-edge requirements.

Still disappointing is the missing link between Semantic Web and the “cool” technologies and buzzwords. From what we see Semantic Web gives answers to some of the industry’s most challenging problems, but it still doesn’t seem to really find its place in relation to the cloud or big data (Hadoop).

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

One trend that I have seen is increased interest in the broader spectrum of semantic technologies in the enterprise. Graph stores, NoSQL, schema-less and more flexible systems, ontologies (& ontologists!) and integration with legacy systems. I believe the Big Data movement has had a positive impact on this field. We are hearing more and more about “Big Data Analytics” from our clients, partners and friends. The analytical power brought to bear by the semantic technology stack is sparking curiosity – what is it really? How can these models help me mitigate risk, more accurately predict outcomes, identify hidden intellectual assets, and streamline business processes? Real questions, tough questions: fun challenges!

Read more

Like lots of other families over the recent Thanksgiving weekend, we made our way to the movies. Our choice: Life of Pi. We’d highly recommend it, and according to the IBM Social Sentiment Index, as applied to Moviegoer Social Sentiment over the holiday weekend, so too would a lot of other folks. It earned a 90 percent positive rating.

IBM has engaged in the social sentiment index pursuit in some other endeavors – using its advanced analytics and natural language processing technologies to analyze large volumes of social media data, it had another recent take on Black Friday, for example. It tallied up that shoppers expressed positive consumer sentiment on promotions, shipping and convenience as well as the retailers themselves at a three to one ratio (see our story here for other takes on semantic tech weighing in on the holiday shopping season).

It’s also applied its social media analysis smarts to studying births of trends (cycle chic is on the rise), and which tennis player was on the hearts and minds of the crowd at the U.S. Open (Novak Djokovic and Laura Robson winning the love, with positive sentiment scores at 90 percent or better).

Read more

Text and sentiment analytics for the masses. That could be a tagline for Semantria, which lets users put the technology to work in a pay-as-you-go cloud model. Not only that, but it lets customers deploy a plug-in to run analytics of unstructured content, extracting entities, themes, sentiment, categories, summaries, facets, and relationships, in one of the world’s most common user environments: Microsoft Excel.

More is on the way, too. This December should see the unveiling of a partnership with an as-yet-unnamed vendor to expand the applications with which its platform is compatible. That partner already offers data integrations with 300 applications; when Semantria becomes the 301^st, users will be able to universally and bi-directionally talk to the hundreds of other applications without having to do any integration work on their own.

Read more

There’s no such thing as too much post-election coverage, is there? Alright, maybe there is. But we couldn’t let things die down without at least a nod to those in our space that have delivered the semantic industry’s own take on the topic.

Here are a few you may want to review:

Twitris Election Insights:

“The Twitris system had an amazing night–while Nate Silver’s model might have received well deserved attention, Twitris gave better indications and insights and large majority of the polls,” wrote Dr. Amit Sheth, Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing director and LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, in an email to us. The semantic social web application (first covered here) is a project of Kno.e.sis at Wright State University.

Read more