Many Computational Linguistic departments across the country are busy developing a broad range of Semantic-based algorithms these days. Browsers came from the academic world, so did a lot of search technology, why not sentiment extraction.
Advertisers traditionally follow consumers. eMarketer just released a study mentioning that already 66 million adults regularly share advice about products and services with others, and 27 million are exerting that influence online. As more people become comfortable with voicing their opinions on the Internet, the number of digital influencers will grow to 34.4 million in 2011. There is a shift underway from few-to-many to many-to-many publishing models resulting in an explosion of consumer-generated media. 44% of Internet users are content creators (PEW), and an increasing ratio of search engine’s top results are now user-authored content. Brand owners are losing share of voice and control over their message. Internet sentiment analysis, buzz monitoring and online reputation management could very well emerge as the next significant search marketing era after SEO and SEM.
SentiMetrix is one of these emerging startups I have been keeping in touch with over the past months. SentiMetrix is offering innovative technology framework to measure sentiments or opinions expressed in the electronic media, worldwide. It combines data gathering with named entity extraction and text analytics, to track opinions expressed about the topics requested by SentiMetrix clients. SentiMetrix platform is based on the award-winning Oasys technology (http://oasys.umiacs.umd.edu/oasys/) developed at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies by Dr. V.S. Subrahmanian and his team. By combining statistical methods with natural language processing techniques, the software closely mimics the way humans perceive opinions expressed in electronic texts, be it news articles, blog posts or customer reviews.
