BuzzTalk is a revolutionary new tool for market monitoring and analysis that uses natural language processing and sentiment analysis to extract insights from vast amounts of online data sources including news sites, blogs, and social media. It identifies trends, detects hype and spikes, and monitors reputations. BuzzTalk analyzes over 16,000 data feeds worldwide using advanced techniques like OpenDover for sentiment tagging and OpenCalais for fact tagging. It generates customizable reports to support marketing, financial, political, and other types of decision making. BuzzTalk has the potential to rapidly become a valuable decision support tool across many industries.

1. Byelex Showcase
BuzzTalk
Client
Byelex B.V.
Technology
A revolutionary shift in the way market monitoring is done JAVA, Oracle, GlassFish, PostGreSQL,
A Compelling Perspective FusionCharts
Delivery
2010 - 2011
Facing today’s marketing challenge
Today’s marketing challenge is to improve ROI by
saving investments and increasing return. Marketing Marketing management support functions
professionals are using advanced market research and a According to Asur and Huberman2 social media content
rapidly increasing range of support systems for enhanced can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular,
budgeting, planning, and decision making. Meanwhile they use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office
Social Media are proliferating, and massive data flows are revenues for movies. A simple model built from the rate
containing huge amounts of valuable, yet under-utilized at which tweets are created about particular topics can
marketing data. The launch of BuzzTalk1 might change outperform market-based predictors. And sentiments
this quite rapidly. extracted from Twitter can be utilized to further improve the
forecasting power of social media.
BuzzTalk gives unprecedented access to unstructured, BuzzTalk is perfectly suited for monitoring and analyzing
textual data, providing new market information to support tweets, blogs and news sites, and for picking, choosing,
decision making. BuzzTalk offers a revolutionary shift in the enhancing and presenting relevant information. For
way market monitoring and analysis is done, enabling new example it will easily:
ways to facing today’s marketing challenge. • Identify new trends;
• Detect hypes and spikes;
• Monitor and analyse the reputations of people,
1 https://buzztalk.nl/ companies and brands.
It will do so in minutes.
What it does
“Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next”
said Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine. From
this perspective BuzzTalk not only will tell the marketing
professional where to look next, it subsequently also
supports her in doing so.
Spike detection
2 Sitaram Asur, Bernardo A. Huberman (2010) Predicting the Future with
Social Media, http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.5699v1
Technology used in this application

2. Byelex Showcase
BuzzTalk
A revolutionary shift in the way market monitoring is done
How it works Each document is cleaned and translated into English.
BuzzTalk can generate reports that are based on a whole Then the sentiment is determined through OpenDover, the
spectrum of user defined searches. These reports provide most powerful sentiment analysis tool currently available.
information and analyses of the online publications and If possible the subject domain is also detected. Currently
social communications on the Internet about the specified OpenDover supports 26 domains including: Politics,
search topics. Disaster, Ecology, Economics, Finance, Business, Health,
BuzzTalk is currently mining 16,000 feeds worldwide, and a range of products, including Health Insurance,
mainly in the United States (over 7,000 feeds), The Medical Care, Pharmaceuticals, Food, Beverage, Audio
Netherlands (5,000 feeds), United Kingdom (1,000 feeds), Players, Cars, Computers, Phones and Software.
Belgium (700 feeds), and Canada (500 feeds). After an article has been sentiment tagged it is sent to
OpenCalais, the largest fact tagging engine on the web.
Influencers dynamic top 50
This engine searches the article for facts within 36 groups BuzzTalk then generates reports such as:
such as: Industry Term, Organization, Company, Market • Overall buzz within reported period for the selected
Index, Person, Country, Region, City, Political Event, Sports search term(s): with a breakdown of the total number
Event, Technology, Operating System, Programming of documents into Positive, Negative, and Neutral.
Language, Published Medium, Medical Treatment, and • Tag analysis: BuzzTalk reports in which tag groups the
Music Album. It tags those facts and returns the results. selected search term is most frequently mentioned.
The top 3 of these groups are broken down to the
most frequently used tags within the group.
• Top 25 most active sources for the selected search
term(s).

3. Byelex Showcase
BuzzTalk
A revolutionary shift in the way market monitoring is done
BuzzTalk technology OpenDover
Three types of data sources BuzzTalk contains a unique combination of OpenDover3
BuzzTalk collects all text documents from 16,000 of the (the best Sentiment Tagging Engine) and OpenCalais4
most active websites around the globe, 2/3 are news sites (the best Fact Tagging Engine).
and 1/3 are blog sites. The authors of these documents are OpenDover is a sophisticated web service that allows
mainly journalists and opinion leaders respectively. The the professional to extract semantic features within
total number of monitored websites will grow to 43,000 in blogs, content management systems, websites, tweets or
the near future. These data sources are complemented by applications.
Twitter, through which consumers express their opinions. OpenDover uses semantic technologies for sentiment
tagging texts, including:
Opinion mining and sentiment analysis • A unique knowledge base of opinion words, domain-
BuzzTalk applies a division of opinion words into ordered related words and intensifiers extracted from hundreds
categories, expressing: of thousands of opinion-related texts;
• a Personal emotional state: happy, delighted, sad, • Diverse expressions of opinion words and phrases:
angry; adjectives, nouns, verbs (both explicit and implicit);
• Appreciation: flexible, efficient, stable, ideal, highest; • Automatic recognition of context dependent and
• Judgement: active, decisive, caring, intelligent. context independent opinion words.
This division is one of BuzzTalk’s cornerstones for opinion
mining and sentiment analysis. OpenCalais
Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities powered by
Thomson Reuters. It allows BuzzTalk to readily incorporate
state-of-the-art semantic functionality within blogs, content
management systems, websites or applications.
The OpenCalais Web Service automatically creates
rich semantic information about the content BuzzTalk
submits – in well under a second. Using natural language
processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais
Language independent analyzes a document and finds the entities within it. But,
Calais goes well beyond classic entity identification and
returns the facts and events hidden within the text as well.
The tags are delivered to BuzzTalk, which then incorporates
them into its analyses and reports.
3 http://opendover.nl/
4 http://www.opencalais.com/

4. Byelex Showcase
BuzzTalk
A revolutionary shift in the way market monitoring is done
Information enhancement and decision Other areas where this is true include:
support - conclusions • Politics (policy making, campaigning, debating);
Information enhancement involves taking data in their • Financial services: banking (risk management), fund
raw form, removing as much noise and redundancy as management (pension, trust funds, hedge funds).
possible, and bringing out a core that’s ready for further Behavioural economics tells us that emotions can
processing. This basic function of BuzzTalk, performed profoundly affect individual behaviour and decision-
on facts, opinions and sentiment, makes it particularly making. Recent research results indicate that the accuracy
suited for supporting the marketing function. For, next to of Dow Jones Industrial Average index predictions can be
facts and figures, opinions and sentiment in the market are significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public
of vital importance for decision making by the marketing mood dimensions5 . We are currently investigating what role
professional - at the strategic, tactical and operational BuzzTalk should play in this respect.
levels. BuzzTalk could also add a new dimension to news services
by providing:
• Journalists with supporting evidence for interpretation;
• Editors with identification and in-depth analyses of the
key issues in current affairs;
• Both with finding hot areas of interest at an early stage.
Our conclusion:
BuzzTalk has the potential of rapidly becoming a valuable
tool for decision makers and professionals in a wide range
of industries, providing them with an advantage over
Stock exchange information
competition.
5 Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, Xiao-Jun Zeng (2010) Twitter mood predicts the
stock market, http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003v1
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