OMG: Analytics Engine to Make Sense of Social-speak"

To help marketers draw more useful conclusions from the adopted language of the social Web, one software and analytics firm has upgraded its reporting capabilities to include the popular acronyms, emoticons and other symbols and abbreviations that have become increasingly prevalent on platforms such as Twitter.

You may want to LOL right now, but if you were to Tweet exactly that on the subject, the core analytics engine from Lexalytics would determine that your message bears no sentiment, that expanding it would not add any value to the resulting lexical processing, and that it should simply be treated as an interjection. The acronym "IDK" (I don't know), on the other hand, is useful when expanded out to its original words, while a message that includes "FTW" (for the win) carries positive sentiment.

The new reporting will also clear up any ambiguous emoticons, such as "8)", which carries a positive sentiment, and ":S", which bears a negative one. The upgraded analytics engine, called Salient, also tags the "@" symbol and the "#" symbol, returning the former as a "people entity" and the latter as a lightweight tag for the content of the tweet or message.

You can check out the new capabilities yourself by visiting Lexalytics.com/demo and pasting in a tweet or any block of text for analysis. Lexalytics specializes in social media monitoring and providing Web professionals the context necessary for making informed business decisions in that rapidly changing environment.