Category Archives: MeaningCloud

This category groups the different aspects of MeaningCloud we talk about in the blog.

Textalytics sponsors the Sentiment Analysis Symposium

Next March 5-6, New York will host a new edition of the Sentiment Analysis Symposium. This is the seventh event of a series organized by industry expert Seth Grimes since year 2010 in San Francisco and NYC.

This is a unique conference in several aspects. First, it is designed specifically to serve the community of professionals interested in Human Analytics and its business application. Second, its audience is integrated by a mix of experts, strategists, practitioners, researchers, and solution providers, which makes a perfect breeding ground for discussion and exchange of points of view. Third, it is designed by just one person (not by a committee), a guarantee of consistency. Being an expert in the consultancy business, Seth Grimes achieves an excellent balance of presentations covering from technology to business application. I attended the New York 2012 edition, where I gave an enlightening talk, and I can tell that the experience was really enriching.

Sentiment Analysis Symposium 2014

Do not be misled by the title: do not interpret “Sentiment Analysis” in a narrow sense. The conference is about discovering business value in opinions, emotions, and attitudes in social media, news, and enterprise feedback. Moreover, the scope is not limited to text sources: speech and image are terms of the equation too.

Continue reading →

Recognizing entities in a text: not as easy as you might think!

Entities recognition: the engineering problem

As in every engineering endeavor, when you face the problem of automating the identification of entities (proper names: people, places, organizations, etc.) mentioned in a particular text, you should look for the right balance between quality (in terms of precision and recall) and cost from the perspective of your goals. You may be tempted to compile a simple list of such entities and apply simple but straightforward pattern matching techniques to identify a predefined set of entities appearing “literally” in a particular piece of news, in a tweet or in a (transcribed) phone call. If this solution is enough for your purposes (you can achieve high precision at the cost of a low recall), it is clear that quality was not among your priorities. However… What if you can add a bit of excellence to your solution without technological burden for… free? If you are interested in this proposition, skip the following detailed technological discussion and go directly to the final section by clicking here.

Continue reading →

MeaningCloud – Meaning as a Service: our new SaaS offering

A few weeks ago we were talking on here about how Daedalus (now called MeaningCloud) has explored various API-based business models for marketing its semantic technologies. Our perception was that basic language features are hard to use for many developers —not experts in these technologies— and require them to build solutions through a process of trial and error, in a do-it-yourself fashion, which is slow and inefficient.

Our vision was to offer the market APIs with a more plug-and-play philosophy, which provide a functionality closer to the business, a faster learning curve and, as a result, an increased productivity. That vision has crystallized in our product Textalytics and today we can say that it is now available.

Textalytics is the easiest way to embed semantics into your applications

Textalytics (now called “MeaningCloud”) is a SaaS offering that provides a high-level multilingual semantic processing functionality to those developers / integrators who want to develop semantic solutions in an effective, quick and cheap way. Compared with other semantic offerings in service mode, MeaningCloud offers several APIs, each with a specific functionality which is close to an application domain, and SDKs, plug-ins, etc. that make its learning and use much easier, reducing the effort required to obtain results and time-to-market.

Textalytics - Meaning as a Service

Continue reading →