23.9.08

Opinion Mining and Marketing Research

The announcement of Nielsen Buzzmetrics has attracted attention to the applications of Opinion Mining (and/or Sentiment Analysis), a relatively young field with huge potential applications to Marketing Research. Opinion Mining is about automatically getting to know what people think on an item (brand, product, anything) from their explicit opinions in blogs, comments to blogs posts and news stories, Social Networks, elsewhere in the Web. It involves Natural Language Processing of texts in order to identify the polarity of opinions (like, dislike, neutral), and many more.

A number of corporations have been offering services/consulting, and software (possibly as a part of a complete data/text mining solution). Some of them are mentions in this post: "Sentiment analysis has more legs than we'd bargained for." I know about at least two Yahoo! Groups in which there relevant discussions: SentimentAI and TextAnalytics.

From a research perspective, the survey by Bo Pang and Lillian Lee for Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval is more than a must. Just check it out for tools and datasets, if you want to get into this challenging field:

Bo Pang and Lillian Lee (2008) "Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis", Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval: Vol. 2: No 1-2, pp 1-135.

A note on the link: it works sometimes (at least for today...).

5 comentarios:

mensajes claro dijo...

I love marketing but sometimes is so hard to get in it.

cinetube dijo...

Interesting article. I am an online marketing fan that I try to learn all I can. I know that exist Nielsen that is an expert in usability and has a system as google analytics. But I didn't know the page you mention in the article nielsenbuzzmetrics.com. I will bookmark this page because I see that has interesting information.

Thanks José María.

Jose Maria Gomez Hidalgo dijo...

You are welcome, cinetube. If you get interested on opinion mining, which imho is the trend in web analytics, I strongly recommend reading the paper by Pang and Lee.

Carvan dijo...

I did not know Nielsen Buzzmetrics services, nor know much about Opinion Mining, thanks for the article, has taught me a lot.

Jose Maria Gomez Hidalgo dijo...

You are welcome!