Discussions on automated sentiment analysis “accuracy” are starting to border on the bizarre. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve read claims that SAS’s new tool can identify sentiment “better than most humans”. Just a few days later, I read a post this week claiming that ”sentiment analysis  best done by humans”. At the heart of this ongoing debate (and confusion) surrounding automated sentiment analysis is the issue of  “accuracy”– the degree to which software can correctly extract positive, negative, or neutral tone from text. Using “accuracy” as a criterion for useful sentiment analysis demonstrates a ...

Forrester and Google announced the results of their study on trends in enterprise web analytics yesterday and the results suggest that companies are starting to realize that analysts, not software, produce useful insights. The study, which surveyed the web analytics decision makers at 198 companies with annual revenues of at least $500 million, found that 60% of respondents believe that web analytics analysts are more valuable than software and that 52% prefer free tools because it allows them to invest ...