Start-up finds online meaning

Software developed at Oxford University that accurately assesses what people mean from what they say online will provide a valuable 'sentiment analysis' tool for businesses, particularly finance companies. A new company, TheySay, has been set up by the University's technology transfer company, Isis Innovation, to exploit the software that is based on work by Professor Stephen Pulman and Karo Moilanen from Oxford University's Department of Computer Science. It has received first-round investment of up to £500,000 from IP Group plc. Understanding sentiment is a proven source of competitive advantage for businesses, public sector bodies, political organisations, and individuals keen to monitor and measure what is being said about them on the Internet. TheySay's approach of using linguistic intelligence along with machine learning techniques overcomes the limitations of existing sentiment analysis tools. The researchers used an exhaustive sentiment classification and scoring scheme to classify linguistic structures for sentiment and to score all individual entity mentions in text. Professor Stephen Pulman, of Oxford University's Department of Computer Science, said: 'We have a very large database of words annotated by hand along several dimensions for the emotional meaning they carry, and we also evaluate the grammatical context in which these words occur, taking account of the effects of negation and other constructs that change meaning.