Guest lecture by Thijs Westerveld

Automatically Analyzing Word of Mouth

Thijs Westerveld from Teezir B.V., Utrecht, will give a guest lecture on 6 October 2010 in ZI-2126. Teezir uses advanced search technology to aggregate views and opinions found on review sites, in discussion groups or blogs. This way, we create statistics and interpretations about what people are saying. Querying this data allows decision makers to slice and dice the content, and learn what people say, either at the very aggregated level: “what is the share of positive versus negative views about our new product?”, or at the very detailed level: “which sources reflect this negative sentiment, and what exactly are people saying?”

Who Rules ruler In this talk I will demonstrate Teezir’s Opinion Analysis dashboards and discuss the underlying technology. For collecting content from web sites we developed advanced crawling technology that automatically identifies relevant news, blog and forum pages and extracts the relevant content and metadata. The collected content is then further analyzed to identify the main sentiments before everything is indexed to be disclosed in the online dashboards. Various sentiment analysis variants that have proven successful in an academic setting have been evaluated on our live collections. I will demonstrate that success on academic test collections does not necessarily imply the practical use of a sentiment analysis algorithm.

See also: Who rules?