Semantria for Excel / Tips and Tricks

Output Settings

The Output Settings dialog provides settings for adjusting the display of information in your reports. Please note that changes made in the Output Settings dialog do not apply to reports that have already been generated, only to subsequent reports.

The Output Settings dialog is divided into sections that group related options together, each section is described in detail below.

Sentiment Coloring

Semantria for Excel applies coloring to positive, negative, and neutral results. The shading of a more positive item will be darker than the shading for a less positive item. By default, green is used for positive results and red is used for negative results, with a grey coloring applied to neutral results. The Sentiment Coloring group provides the option to adjust these to a custom color scheme.

Sentiment Options

This group provides enabling of two specific sentiment options:

Enable mixed sentiment polarity

When selecting User-defined polarity, enabling this option additionally labels content that contains a mix of positive and negative sentiment, where the positive and negative content may counterbalance, to be labeled as "mixed".

Enable model-based sentiment

This option must be used in conjunction with professional services engagements to develop machine learning models for sentiment analysis instead of phrase-based sentiment. This option is only enabled if use of model-based sentiment is available to your account.

Additional Options

Many of the Output Settings options are related to the depiction of sentiment in the results, the Additional Options are settings that are not strictly sentiment-related.

Show document information in all Detail Reports

By default, the Detail Reports (Sentiment Phrases, Themes, Entities, etc.), contain a hyperlink back to the original document record with it's associated metadata on the Document Overview report that is additionally generated. Enabling this option outputs the document text and associated metadata on each Detail Report.

Enable one-click report generation

Report generation has been reworked in this release of Semantria for Excel to introduce the concept of "one-click report generation". When enabled, selecting the Themes option from the Detail Reports menu instantly generates the Theme Detail report, versus the checkmark selection method in previous versions of Semantria for Excel.

Query term highlighting color

This option allows customization of the coloring used for query term hits in the Query Detail report when Mentions are enabled in output.

Number of items to display in Summary Reports

This option specifies the number of items to display initially in the pivot tables and word clouds generated in Summary Reports.

Configuration settings

The Configuration Settings dialog provides information about a specific configuration to be used in analyzing content. This dialog is accessed through the More menu displayed when viewing the Tuning section in the Semantria for Excel panel.

Main settings

Within the main settings, you can change the Name of the configuration and the Language of content that it should be used to process. The other main settings shown are as follows.

Alphanumeric Threshold

This is a value between 0 and 100 that indicates what percentage of the content provided (not counting whitespace) must be alphanumeric characters. The default value is 80, meaning that 80% of a piece of content provided for analysis must be alphanumeric. This is a quality measure to avoid processing content that contains a large amount of junk characters. For processing short content such as Twitter however, this threshold should be reduced to accommodate for the shorter text. The tweet "Great!!!!" would fail an 80% threshold because of the excess of "!" characters. A threshold of 25% is more appropriate for short-form content.

One Sentence

This option adjusts the analysis for short-form content, generally tweets. It reduces the alphanumeric threshold to 25%, and considers each piece of content to be a single sentence.

Concept Topics Threshold

Concept topics are also referred to as User Categories, and are a method of categorizing content based on finding conceptual matches between the provided content and the topic definitions. In comparison to query topics, which apply boolean logic to query terms to find topic matches, concept topics do not have to contain the exact words to match on content. This threshold, from 0.00 to 1.0 provides a minimum level that a match must achieve in order to be reported as a result.

Entities Threshold

Entities are extracted from content in a few ways, through a machine learning model trained to identify the names of people, places, companies, and products, various rules to identify pattern-based entities such as dates and currency amounts, and through user-defined entities. Similar to concept topics, this threshold sets a minimum level that entities identified by the built-in machine learning model must achieve in order to be reported in entity results.

Detailed settings

The Detailed settings turn on or off certain types of results to be retrieved from content analysis. Some features may not be available to your account, but in general all of these should be enabled in order to generate the range of results possible for the analysis of your content.

Generating reports in Semantria for Excel 5.3

Generating reports with one click

If you are a first-time user of Semantria for Excel, your first step is to select some content to analyze. The New Analysis Wizard guides you through this process by simply pressing the “Start” button on the Lexalytics ribbon. Once your content has been analyzed, select any of the reports from the sections in the Report Library to generate that report.

• Interested in the categorization of your content through queries?
  Click the arrow underneath “Detail Reports” and select Queries, and the Query Detail report generates instantly.
• Did you process survey content, and need to see key themes that your Promoters or Detractors are expressing?
  Click the arrow beneath “Survey Reports” and select NPS. You’ll be prompted to provide some additional information for the report, and then Semantria for Excel builds the NPS report on a new sheet.

Adding a new report set

To add a new report set, simply click the Add button. This will create a new entry in the list of report sets titled "New Report Set". This can be renamed as needed. Once the report set has been added, selections of available reports can be made in the right half of the screen. These are the reports that will be generated when this report set is selected in the New Analysis Wizard or other areas of Semantria for Excel.

This report set is now going to provide me, in one selection, a complete view of the query categorization of my content, from a high-level pivot table and word cloud of top topics, to a detailed breakdown of topics identified for each document, and a listing of documents that did not fit into any current topic.

Managing selections in a report set

As mentioned in the section above when adding a new report set, selecting a report set in the left half enables the checkbox selections for reports in the right half. Selecting a top-level item such as "Detail Reports" will select all detail reports. Alternatively, individual reports can be selected to customize the reports to generate.

Renaming report sets

To rename a report set, simply click its name in the left half to select it. Once enabled, the name for the report set can be edited as desired.

Removing a report set

To report a report set, select the report set in the left half and press the Remove button.

Using Report Sets

Now that I have a report set, how and where can I use it? The first place you may notice this now is in the New Analysis Wizard. After you have provided the information about the content that you want to analyze, and the configuration to use for the analysis, you can now select a report set to use for viewing the results of the analysis. After sending the content for analysis, Semantria for Excel 5.3 will poll the Semantria service for results. Once all results have been received, the reports that are defined for the “Query categorization” report set will be generated automatically. Relax, have a coffee, and let Semantria for Excel 5.3 do the work.

If there is content that you have already processed, before creating a report set, you can still use your report set to visualize the results. Double-click the analysis in the Semantria for Excel side panel. This shows the Analysis Information dialog, with information about the analysis and actions that you can take. The report set that you use most frequently will be automatically selected, click the button to generate the reports. Other actions such as reanalyzing the content or deleting the analysis can also be taken from within this dialog.

Report generation for users migrating from previous versions of Semantria for Excel

If you’ve been using Semantria for Excel, the new “one-click” report generation may be a bit of a change for you. Not to worry, the install for Semantria for Excel 5.3 detects an upgrade, and turns off “one-click” report generation. When you launch Semantria for Excel 5.3, you’ll notice the “Generate reports” button in the Lexalytics ribbon. The report selection follows the same checkmark selection from the menus as before, and clicking “Generate reports” provides the same user experience as the “View” button that was previously found in the Semantria for Excel side panel.

When you select multiple reports from the Report Library and click “Generate reports”, you’ll be asked if you wish to create a report set from your selections, which you can name for use with future analyses through the New Analysis Wizard and through the Analysis Information dialog.

If you wish to enable one-click report generation, the option to do so can be found in the redesigned Output Settings dialog.