Sentiment Analysis for Business, Finance & Social Media Showcased at May 8, New York Symposium

The speaker line-up next Sentiment Analysis Symposium is out. This symposium, the fourth, is slated for May 8, 2012 in New York. With speakers and panelists leading firms (including American Express, Fidelity Investments, Kraft Foods, the Red Cross, Thomson Reuters, and Yahoo), start-ups, and academia, it will be the best yet.

Our tag line remains unchanged:

The symposium bridges technology and business in one of the most exciting applications to emerge in recent years: software that discovers business value in opinions and attitudes in social media, news, and enterprise feedback.

SAS logoBut our program is better than ever. Keynotes kick off the morning sessions:

  • Prof. Jan Wiebe of the Univ of Pittsburgh is a sentiment-analysis pioneer. She will speak on Sentiment, Subjectivity, and Sense, providing a leading researcher’s view of the state of sentiment, and where we’re heading.
  • Drinking from the Fire Hose authors Chris Frank (American Express) and Paul Magnone (Openet Telecom) are slated to tackle (working title) Emotional Versus Rational in Customer Decision Making.

If you’re sold, click here to visit the registration page.

The Sentiment Analysis Symposium series has drawn steadily growing numbers, from 95 attendees in April 2010 to 120 (capacity) in April 2011 to 154 in San Francisco last November. (The linked text will take you to pages with videos of the last two symposiums’ presentations.) We’re both building on past success and aiming to keep the program fresh, on the leading edge of sentiment technologies and applications. The symposium is not just another Social Media Blah, Blah, Blah show. Instead, it showcases ground-breaking sentiment-analysis applications and provides unique learning opportunities.

Learning is why, in addition to talks by Jan Wiebe and a new presentation by Prof. Ronen Feldman of Hebrew University, who co-founded solution provider Digital Trowel — Feldman will speak on Unsupervised Learning: Insight in Business News, Medical Forums, and Public Filings — we’ll once again have a half-day, day-before Practical Sentiment Analysis tutorial, on May 7, this year taught by Prof. Bing Liu, another sentiment/opinion-mining expert. Liu was featured in a January 26 New York Times article, For $2 a Star, an Online Retailer Gets 5-Star Product Reviews.

Other May 8 speakers include two of our San Francisco symposium panelists, Banafsheh Ghassemi of the American Red Cross (A Multi-Channel Proposition: Customer Sentiment and (Much) More) and Carol Haney, now with Toluna (Tween Pants Cut Too Low!! (or, Combine Survey Research & Social Monitoring to Discover the Unknown)). (Carol’s original title was Tween Butt-Crack: Finding new trends of dissatisfaction by integrating social media data with open-end data, but I asked her to make it both more and less descriptive.) Rich Brown from Thomson Reuters is another repeat, a highly rated presenter at the April 2010 symposium. Brown’s title this go-around is Forecasting Financial Market Response from News and Social Media Sentiment.

New to the symposium, we have Andera Gadeib, CEO of German-based Dialego AG, speaking on Market Research Beyond Sentiment: Differentiating the Engaged and Pleased.

You may have noticed an interest in talks that tell you how to use sentiment analysis and how to combine it with data from diverse online and enterprise sources, and on beyond positive/negative analysis that help you understand and exploit emotion, mood, and opinion in the spectrum of sources. We also focus on User Perspectives in a series of three shorter presentations followed by a panel discussion:

  • Can automated sentiment analysis be less accurate than flipping a coin? — Dana Jacob, Yahoo
  • Who are the most loyal customers? — Sobhan Hota, Fidelity Investments
  • “How Can I Listen If I’m Talking?”: The Power Of Social Media Listening — Frank Cotignola, Kraft Foods

As usual, we’ll have a series of 5-minute lightning talks just before the lunch break:

  • Sentiment As A Service — Michael Tupanjanin, Metavana
  • Political Sentiment Analysis — Dr. Stuart W. Shulman, Texifter
  • Sentiment Visualization — Vsevolod Gavrilyuk, SemanticForce (tentative)
  • Data-driven Sentiment Analysis of Financial News — Matt Sommer, MarketChorus Inc.

And we have a new Innovators & Innovation panel to close this year’s program, with Leslie Barrett (The Ladders), Prof. Bing Liu (University of Illinois at Chicago), and Romi Mahajan (Metavana).

Lastly, in order to maximize networking opportunities, we’re once again planning evening-before and post-symposium receptions.

I’m really looking forward to the May 8 symposium. I hope you’ll consider joining us. If you have questions do get in touch, and I hope to see you there.

P.S. Thank you to sponsors Attensity, Lexalytics, and NetBase (there are others pending), whose support makes the symposium possible.

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