Opinion Mining Startups

Jodange has just released a couple of interesting Google gadgets which relate opinion to the presidential race. Jodange specializes in sentiment mining, deriving tuples of the form <holder, opinion, target>. Jodange's technology is built on ongoing research from Cornell's computer science department. You can play with the gadgets on their homepage.

There are a number of startups out there which are all focused on this one piece of technology which is often associated with social media analysis:

• Sentimetrix : Provides sentiment mining technologies to social media analysis shops.
• Sentiment Metrics : A competitor to Visible Technologies and others in the enterprise facing space.
• OpinMind : OpinMind has a new look, but its ad targeting system is differentiated by their opinion mining technology.
• Summize : "Summize connects you with the opinions of millions of people on zillions of products. We scour the web for the latest user reviews and blogger discussions, surmise their sentiments, and summarize them here."

In general, I see a number of reasons to be impressed with Jodange. They have a strong research background (investing in the science behind automated analysis is a key commitment often overlooked by companies in this space - see an earlier post on this); their formulation of the opinion mining problem is simple, but contains enough structure to ensure they focus on key questions (especially the problems of associating the opinion holder and the target of the opinion with the opinion itself); they have rolled out some simple but useful user experiences (again, UX is often overlooked - why hire a UX person when you could augment your sales staff?).