Since the recent New York Times piece on sentiment analysis, it seems everyone has an opinion on sentiment analysis (how appropriate, yes?). Without actually counting, I'm getting the impression that the overall score is negative, although with the colloquialisms and subtle innuendo, I'm not always sure. :-)

This is a round-up post, so I'm going to start linking to posts I've seen in a minute, but first, we have a problem: a buzzword alignment problem on what to call companies who monitor and analyze social media content. The article uses sentiment analysis to refer to the industry, but sentiment analysis is better understood as just one of the types of analysis used in the field.

This industry has a history of picking up a new label almost every time someone new writes about it. Forrester Research has called it brand monitoring and listening platforms, depending on which year and analyst you ask. I picked social media analysis when I had to choose, but even that is more limited than the state of the art tools and services. I don't have an answer to that one that makes me happy just yet.

Scoring the conversation
Oh, OK, I'll count. Really, how could I resist? Isn't this the obvious way to collect the posts on this topic?

Positive

Negative
Neutral
This was an ongoing discussion long before the Times article. Mike Marshall made for the case for automation of large-scale analysis in the first guest post on SMA. I suggested additional models for the human vs. computer dichotomy in early 2007. I don't imagine we'll settle this any time soon.

This list is an example of document-level sentiment analysis by a human. Anyone want to make the case that it might not be 100% accurate?


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