Lexalytics Delivers the First Real-Time Sports Index for Social Data

Inconsistent Social Data Plays Foul

COMPANY: Sports Technology Company
INDUSTRY: Entertainment and Sports Technology
MISSION: Sports Technology Company enables teams, brands, sponsors, agents, and sports fans to deliver actionable insights to drive superior business outcomes and gain competitive advantage

A sports technology company delivers actionable insights into the brand performance of the world’s top athletes and teams. To do this, they gather information and social data from leading sporting data providers and social media platforms and they needed a powerful NLP platform to analyze this data. But sports talk is full of colloquialisms and double meanings. The sentences “Ronaldo is sick!” and “Messi killed that defender,” for example, clearly don’t refer to Cristiano’s physical health or accuse Lionel of homicide. The sports tech company turned to Lexalytics for an analytics engine that could decode the jargon-filled language of competitive sports.

1-Month Integration Time 500,000 Documents Processed a Day

Together, Lexalytics’ Semantria API and the sports tech company’s proprietary algorithms form the backbone of the sports index platform. The engine understands fan vernacular across 19 languages and accurately translates it as positive or negative based on context. Lexalytics also helps the team at the sports tech company separate brands from stadiums that share their name. Semantria’s flexibility makes it easy to train the API to, for instance, tell the difference between Emirates the airline and Emirates the stadium in London. This capability is especially useful to franchise owners and player agents, who can pick out specific mentions from general chatter about their brand or team and address PR problems before they get out of hand.

Choosing Lexalytics over its competitors was easy — thanks to the mix of service, price, ease of use, and language packs. Further, Lexalytics counts extraction and sentiment analysis as one action. The other solutions we looked at bill extraction and sentiment separately, charging double the volume and double the price.

Vice President of Product, Sports Technology Brand