really is. Philip Vaughn, co-founder of the Seattle-area startup Raveable, has some valuable perspective. Raveable is a travel website that summarizes the sentiment of hotel user reviews. As Vaughn explains, there are three different technical approaches involved in these various companies: making sense of opinions (sentiment analysis), classifying topics (what is a statement about), and mapping relationships (who else has similar sentiment). “From a business perspective, there is an opportunity to do [things] on a scale never before possible,” he says.
An earlier conversation with Vaughn convinced me that understanding the sentiment of a sentence where the computer doesn’t know the exact context or topic—hotel rooms, say, or doctors in hospitals—is still too difficult for today’s commercial software (indeed this can be hard for a person too). It’s a deep research problem in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and many groups are working on it. “Broad sentiment typically has lower accuracy than topic-based sentiment analysis,” Vaughn says.
But, for certain targeted business applications, sentiment analysis has clearly found a home—especially when packaged with other customer-focused products. Take Appature and the healthcare market. “From what we’ve seen of other offerings, they do a good job of giving you sentiment around social media based on keywords,” Shahani says. “But it is not integrated with the broader set of data a company has about their customer. In many cases that satisfies the need, but our customers are looking to leverage social media in a much more actionable and relevant way.”
On that thought, the granddaddy of local “sentimental” startups (my usage, not theirs) is probably Bellevue, WA-based Visible Technologies. Founded in 2003, Visible takes all of this a step further in another direction: reputation management for brands, products, and people. Back in June, the company released TruReputation, a software product that expands on what Visible is already known for—namely monitoring the Web for buzz about a particular brand or company, and helping marketers respond to it. The latest software finds positive and negative content about a brand online, say, and uses keyword placement, optimization, and linking techniques to make the positive entries pop up higher in search results (on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and AOL Search). How exactly it does this is a company secret, but Visible has certainly been getting a lot of interest.
So where is all of this headed? The business applications of sentiment analysis are clearly taking off in certain targeted marketplaces, and the Seattle area has become a leader in the space. Beyond that, the effort to make sense of greater and greater reams of data will continue, but semantic technology needs to improve before we’ll see it everywhere.
