I am the first to admit my handwriting is worse than ever, I can’t remember the last time I hand wrote a letter, and I swore I’d never text. Generations have clashed as those who mourn the loss of the pen and paper and those who use an abbreviated version of the English language attempt to co-exist in this techno-advanced world.

Before you blame Facebook or the Internet for the loss of the properly written word, know that whatever language the new generation is using, they are creating mass amounts of data with it. So it is in everyone’s best interest to understand the meaning and sentiment of that data. Enter semantic technology.

These text analytics tools are geared to recognize brand references from the massive volumes of online communication generated every day. But can they determine the sentiment being positive or negative?

This interesting topic was brought to our attention by Research-Live in their article, “Write here, write now.” Natural language processing systems are more adept than ever at interpreting meaning. It will be interesting to see where this will take us.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.