The March 5-6, 2014 Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York explores business value in the world of “human data”: Sentiment, emotion, behavior, and connection, in online, social, and enterprise sources. We — analysts, strategists, and executives — at brands, agencies, and financial institutions and in government and research — seek to discover insight in text, speech, images, clickstreams, and video. Symposium presentations and panels will link all that data goodness to business needs and outcomes.

Please join us.

You’ll hear and network with industry-leading speakers and panelists from Accenture, the Advertising Research Foundation, Amazon, American Express, The Huffington Post, IBM, KRC Research, Luminoso, and the MIT Media Lab, plus start-ups and academia — covering social/media intelligence — for customer experience, finance, healthcare, market research, and media applications. Plus we have six great sponsors so far: the IBM jStart emerging technology program plus Lexalytics, Gnip, and start-ups SentiMetrix, Textalytics (an off-shoot of Daedalus in Spain), and TheySay, with others pending.

The symposium will be preceded by an optional, March 5 human analytics workshop day. The Business Track will feature two half-workshops, Social/Media Measurement in the morning, taught by Stephen Rappaport of the Advertising Research Foundation, and in the afternoon, Customer Insight Analytics, taught by Beyond the Arc CEO Steve Ramirez. The Technical Track workshops are a reprise of our half-day Practical Sentiment Analysis tutorial, this go-around developed and taught by Jason Baldridge of the University of Texas at Austin (co-founder of Apache OpenNLP), followed by a Technology & Innovation session with in-depth technical presentations. When you register, feel free to choose one workshop from each track.

The symposium and human analytics workshops are designed for businesses that want to lead the competition — in customer satisfaction and support, brand and reputation management, financial services, product design and marketing, and an array of other business processes — for those who understand the advantage they will gain in understanding customer, market, employee, investor, and political sentiment, emotion, mood, and opinion. The symposium kicks off with talks covering a range of sentiment & emotion analytics applications:

• Rosalind Picard, professor at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of start-up Affectiva, will keynote on “Adventures in Emotion Recognition.”
• Stephen Rappaport, knowledge solutions director at the Advertising Research Foundation, is slated to moderate a Visionaries Panel with members Bradley Honan, KRC Research; Joseph P. Hughes, Accenture; and Augie Ray, American Express.
• David Rabjohns, CEO of “social anthropology” agency MotiveQuest, “Mapping Human Motivations to Move Product.”
• Social-analytics strategist Marie Wallace, of IBM, kicks off the afternoon session with a talk titled “Engagement: The Unspoken Connection.”
• Huffington Post CTO John Pavley will speak on “Sentiment Analysis for Comment Moderation.”
• Prof. Stephen Pulman of the University of Oxford will describe “Bleeding Edge NLP,” application of Natural Language Processing technology to extract and analyze events, relationships, emotion, intent, identity, and “lots of other good stuff.”
• Prof. VS Subrahmanian of the University of Maryland will speak on “Forecasting the Spread of Sentiments and Emotion in Social Media.”

Visit the symposium agenda page for the full program and a link to online registration, at sentimentsymposium.com/registration.html. A 10% Super Early registration discount runs through December 23, 2013. (We also have a 50% government/academic discount and a special low rate for full-time students.)

The Sentiment Analysis Symposium series has grown steadily, with four New York symposiums and two San Francisco symposiums held since 2010. (Videos of talks at earlier symposiums are available for free access at the symposium Web site.) The symposium both builds on past success and aims to stay on the leading edge of sentiment technologies and applications.

Again, please join us!