First let’s look at the definition of the Sentiment Analysis [Wikipedia]:
“Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to a broad (definitionally challenged) area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).”
And why you should care?
Social Media and Social Networking have fueled the online space. Ratings, reviews, comments, etc – are everywhere. From NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html :
“This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.”
We tell our clients – you have to listen to what people are saying about your brand, products, services… and more importantly you should react, respond. Nicely said than done. Simple Twitter search on iPhone will give you tons of results. Is it possible for a brand to manually look at the every single mention and respond?? Of course not! Automation is the strategy… But – smart automation. As a consumer I do not want to get some irrelevant auto-response from a brand.
Solution – analysis of the unstructured texts. Not just on a set of keywords, but also on emotions. Not an easy task to do, but there are visionary companies who are working on tools/products that can help brands to deal with all these amounts of unstructured content and help them to make sense of the emotions hidden behind customer’s feedback.
We were able to gather an amazing panel of experts who will take us on a journey inside the fascinating space of sentiment analysis.
Save the date! You do not want to miss these discussions!
Date: March 2, 2010
Location: Mountain View, CA
Time: 6:30 pm
