Opinion Crawl – Web sentiment analysis

The following is a sponsored post by SenseBot.

OpinionCrawl.com is a new site that allows visitors to assess Web sentiment on a subject – a person, an event, a company or product. For example, you can assess sentiment on a politician (Barack Obama), a celebrity (Sandra Bullock), a company (Goldman Sachs), a current event (Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico), etc.

You can enter a subject and get an ad-hoc sentiment assessment of it. For each topic you get a pie chart expressing current real-time sentiment, a list of the latest news headlines, a few recent thumbnail images, and a tag cloud of key semantic concepts that the public associates with the subject. The concepts allow you to see what issues or events drive the sentiment in a positive or negative way.

The ad-hoc sentiment is calculated on a small number of recent news items. If you want to look at the sentiment trend, go to the blog section of the site: OpinionCrawl.com/blog. All posts in the blog are generated automatically and updated daily. Our intelligent Web crawlers find the latest pages on many popular subjects or current public issues, and calculate sentiment for them on an ongoing basis. The blog posts show the trend of sentiment over time, as well as Positive-to-Negative ratio. For example, you can see how the sentiment on Goldman Sachs has been changing since the beginning of the SEC investigation.

The blog categories include Current Events, Economy, Companies/Products, Politics, and Entertainment. Weekly and Monthly views are posted in addition to the Daily view. The blog goes over a larger number of news items.

Watching the cloud of concepts over time, you can see the change in the issues and key topics that the Web public associates with the subject, and how it affects the sentiment. The concepts are mined from the Web pages using our semantic engine SenseBot. Semantic analysis helps to attribute the sentiment to the right entity, and to identify key concepts defining the public opinion.

For companies or agencies, we produce in-depth sentiment reports on a subscription basis. The reports cover subjects selected by the client, and can crawl a large number of specific sources that are of interest to the client. Typical users are PR or IR agencies monitoring the image of their clients; companies watching over the reputation of their brand, products, management, or their competitors. Both the sentiment and the issues that investors or consumers associate with the topic are presented on the reports.

For traders and hedge funds, real-time sentiment reports monitoring market-related sources can be produced.

About the company: Semantic Engines is a company in New York city that has produced the semantic search engine SenseBot, contextual ad-matching tool LinkSensor, semantic API, and other tools. Our entry into the sentiment analysis field is backed by many years of experience in NLP/text mining and semantic analysis.