The Expert System team participated in a panel at the recent SemTechBiz conference in London and came back with some positive insights about where semantic technologies are making a difference. First off, semantic technologies are “Improving processing of anaphora, which are used commonly in social media communications, such as posts on blogs, Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. The interpretation of anaphora is important for a correct analysis of sentiment among several posts, or even in the same post where information is not always explicitly expressed. Correct processing of anaphora allows you to almost double the collection of opinions and sentiment expressed online (i.e., ‘I love the new iPhone’ and, a few posts later ‘But I don’t love it any more’ where the person is still talking about the iPhone).”
The article adds, “This also applies to identifying influencers. Analyzing style and tone of writing, you can also understand if someone writing under two different usernames is actually the same person. The same opinion expressed by different people has a different weight than the same opinion expressed repeatedly by the same person.”
Semantic technologies are also “Refining the analysis of sentences in which there is a comparison between entities, companies or products (‘I think the Fiat 500 is much cooler than the Beetle.’).” And they are “Improving analysis of difficult to interpret information such as that written in ungrammatical slang or acronyms, which is common in Tweets, Facebook posts and other communications between friends or limited by 140 characters.”
Image: Courtesy Expert System
