Sentiment Extraction: Measuring the Emotional Tone of Text
Sentiment Extraction: Measuring the Emotional Tone of Text
Historically, the measurement of tone was the responsibility of the marketing department in an organization and was typically done by hand. The obvious limitations of scoring content by hand led to the development of machine scoring. Once you have reliable, consistent machine-based sentiment scoring, there are a number of applications that become feasible inside of financial services (automated trading, better information to traders), reputation management (the problem every marketing person faces), “voice of customer” (listen to how they’re saying what they say, don’t constrain them to closed-ended questions), eDiscovery (was there a wave of negative emails before a certain crisis hit?), etc… Lexalytics has been dealing with mechanical analysis of sentiment for over seven years now. As such, we have a substantial amount of experience in performing this and know where it works well. Unfortunately, many vendors haven’t been doing it as long as we have, so you need to be wary of over-reaching claims and confusing descriptions by the vendors rolling out early sentiment engines. This paper will demystify sentiment scoring and explain how the Lexalytics sentiment engine works. This includes a discussion of how and why we have extended the basic concept of document sentiment to the paragraph and entity level, and how this technology is being further extended to measure other indicators within content, including the assessment of threat, customer satisfaction and many other contextual indicators. |
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Sentiment scoring allows a computer to consistently rate the positive or negative assertions that are associated with a document or entity. The scoring of sentiment (sometimes referred to as tone) from a document is a problem that was originally raised in the context of marketing and business intelligence, where being able to measure the public’s reaction to a new marketing campaign (or a corporate scandal) can have a measurable financial impact on your business.
