Isis technology featured in The Economist
4th October 2009
Oxford University Innovation technology has been featured.
The Economist article
A technology enabling computers to assess the emotional meaning of text is featured in The Economist.
Professor Stephen Pulman and and Karo Moilanen of Oxford University’s Computing Laboratory are working with Isis to commercialise the tool which uses “sentiment analysis” software to assess text by understanding the grammatical structure of sentences. By applying and analysing emotional labels, the software can construct sentiment scores for the concepts mentioned in the text, as a combination of positive, negative and neutral results.
The researchers say this approach is better than existing text-mining systems, which can inform companies what people think of them but cannot make complex links between statements.
As well as companies seeking to better understand their customer, intelligence agencies are also becoming interested in the sentiment analysis. Some agencies are using tools developed at the University of Arizona’s artificial intelligence laboratory to map intense, violent emotion in online forums frequented by political radicals in order to identify surges of bad feelings and even potential terrorists.
Read The Economist article here .
