Knowledge Extraction from Social Media

Who’s Doing What for Whom, and How?
The Social Media Analysis Solution Space

Seth Grimes
@sethgrimes

Deconstruction

The topic “Knowledge Extraction and Consolidation
from Social Media” is comprised of:
• Knowledge Extraction.
• Knowledge Consolidation.
• Social Media.

Sentiment, opinion mining, and analysis are involved.
I’ll talk about these matters.

Deconstruction, 2

My topic: Who’s Doing What for Whom?
• Who = Solution providers:
researchers, software, services.
• What = Social media analysis (SMA), “social business,”
analytics-infused advisory services.
• For Whom = Business users.
• How = Technologies.
I’ll talk about these elements as well, starting with the
applications, then moving to tech, then to
providers.

Theses

Social Media = Platforms + Networks + Content.
Knowledge = Contextualized, interrelated information.
Knowledge, in automated settings, must be structured
to be usable .
Consolidation involves
collection, filtering, analysis, reduction, integration, i
nference, and presentation… iteratively.
“Business is a collection of activities carried on for
whatever purpose, be it
science, technology, commerce, industry, law, governm
ent, defense, et cetera.”

Business Questions

What are people saying? What’s hot/trending?
What are they saying about {topic|person|product} X?
... about X versus {topic|person|product} Y?
How has opinion about X and Y evolved?
How has opinion correlated with
{our|competitors’|general}
{news|marketing|sales|events}?
What’s behind opinion, the root causes?
• (How) Can we link opinions & transactions?
• (How) Can we link opinion & intent?
Who are opinion leaders?

Business Needs

How do these factors affect my business?
How can answers to these questions help me
improve business processes?

We have a decision support need and an operational
need. We=
• Consumers.
• Marketers.
• Competitors.
• Managers.

Analysis Approaches

In industry settings, we (should) work backward:
Mission  Goals  Presentation  Methods &
Data
• What are your business goals?
• What insights will help your reach them?
• What data, transformation, and presentations will
generate those insights?
• For each option, what will it cost and what is it worth:
What is the expected/projected ROI?
Sometimes we work this way, and sometimes we
want to explore…

Data, Information & Knowledge

“Where America’s Racist
Tweets Come From”

http://mashable.com/2012/11/11/racist-tweets/

Document
input and
processing

Knowledge
handling is Desk Set (1957): Computer engineer
key Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy)
and television network librarian
Bunny Watson (Katherine Hepburn)
H.P. Luhn, “A and the "electronic brain" EMERAC.
Business
Intelligence
System,” IBM
Journal, October
1958

Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) was first defined in 1958:
“In this paper, business is a collection of activities carried on
for whatever purpose, be it
science, technology, commerce, industry, law, government, d
efense, et cetera... The notion of intelligence is also defined
here... as ‘the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of
presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a
desired goal.’”
-- Hans Peter Luhn
“A Business Intelligence System”
IBM Journal, October 1958
Applies to --

The Popular, Misguided View, 2

Incomplete!

All media are social.

Incomplete, 2

Personal. Mobile. Knowledge Infused.

http://timoelliott.com/blog/2010/10/sap-businessobjects-augmented-
explorer-now-available-resources-to-test-it.html

What Is Our Vision? Our Goal?

The inclusion of social data and social-derived insights
(a.k.a. information) in a global knowledge network?
The social Semantic Web?
The Semantic Social Web?

Why extract knowledge from social media?
• The academic challenge is interesting but not enough.
• We want to create better social-computing experiences.
• We want to infuse social into other computing realms.

Our Social Knowledge Goal?
http://www.cambridgesemantics.com/sema
ntic-university/semantic-search-and-the-
semantic-web

http://img.freebase.com/api/trans/raw/m/02dtnzv

“The Semantic Web has been and remains a
parallel, incomplete, never-up-to-date subset of the World Wide
Web and the databases accessible through it.” (Me, 2010)

Business Driven Approaches

Pragmatic knowledge structuring.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

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Contact Details:
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Main address:
<span itemprop="streetAddress">38 avenue de l'Opera</span>
<span itemprop="postalCode">F-75002</span>
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Paris, France</span> ,
</div>
Tel:<span itemprop="telephone">( 33 1) 42 68 53 00 </span>, http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/rnews-
Fax:<span itemprop="faxNumber">( 33 1) 42 68 53 01 </span>,
E-mail: <span itemprop="email">secretariat(at)google.org</span> is-here-and-this-is-what-it-means/
</div>

http://schema.org/Organization

Data pipes Business Driven Approaches, 2a

Business Driven Approaches, 3

Social media monitoring.

http://www.goldbachinteractive.com/current-news/technical-papers/social-media-
monitoring-a-small-market-overview-sysomos-radian6-and-more

Business Driven Approaches, 3’

Dashboards and engagement consoles.

Business Driven, 4

Infographics: Old wine, new bottles.
− Static, non-collaborative.
+ I like narrative.

Business Driven Approaches, 5

A
Semanticized
Web

Business Driven, 6

Question Authorities.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiki
pedia/en/wiki/File:Watson_Jeopar
dy.jpg

Milestones

Language+ understanding.
• Text, speech, and video.
• Narrative, discourse, and argument.
Information extraction.

Knowledge structuring and integration.
Inference; synthesis.
Language generation.
Conversation; interaction; autonomy.
≈> Convergence, a.k.a. Singularity

What does the market say?

Free report download via http://altaplana.com/TA2011

Users (current & potential) say

Important sources

What textual information are you analyzing or do
you plan to analyze?
blogs and other social media (twitter, social- 62% (2011)
network sites, etc.) 47% (2009)

news articles 41% (2011)
44% (2009)
on-line forums 35% (2011)
35% (2009)
customer/market surveys 35% (2011)
34% (2009)
reviews 30% (2011)
21% (2009)
e-mail and correspondence 29% (2011)
36% (2009)

Applications

Text analytics has applications in –
• Intelligence & law enforcement.
• Life sciences.
• Media & publishing including social-media analysis and
contextual advertizing.
• Competitive intelligence.
• Voice of the Customer: CRM, product management &
marketing.
• Legal, tax & regulatory (LTR) including compliance.
• Recruiting.

Online Commerce

Text analytics is applied for marketing, search
optimization, competitive intelligence.
• Analyze social media and enterprise feedback to
understand opportunities, threats, trends.
• Categorize product and service offerings for on-site
search and faceted navigation and to enrich content
delivery.
• Annotate pages to enhance Web-search
findability, ranking.
• Scrape competitor sites for offers and pricing.
• Analyze social and news media for competitive
information.

Voice of the Customer

Text analytics is applied to enhance customer service
and satisfaction.
• Analyze customer interactions and opinions –
• E-mail, contact-center notes, survey responses.
• Forum & blog posting and other social media.
• – to –
• Address customer product & service issues.
• Improve quality.
• Manage brand & reputation.
• If you can link qualitative information from text you can –
• Link feedback to transactions.
• Assess customer value.
• Understand root causes.
• Mine data for measures such as churn likelihood.

E-Discovery and Compliance

Text analytics is applied for compliance, fraud and
risk, and e-discovery.
• Regulatory mandates and corporate practices dictate –
• Monitoring corporate communications.
• Managing electronic stored information for production in event of
litigation.
• Sources include e-mail (!!), news, social media
• Risk avoidance and fraud detection are key to effective
decision making
• Text analytics mines critical data from unstructured sources.
• Integrated text-transactional analytics provides rich insights.

Knowledge, Enrichment & Integration

Semantics enables join across types and/or sources
and/or structures, using meaningful identifiers, to
create an ensemble that is greater than the sum of
the parts.
Interrelate information to represent knowledge.
Enrichment and integration involve:
• Mappings and transformations.
• Aggregation and collection.
• All the typical data concerns:
cleansing, profiling, consistency, security,…

A Big Data analytics architecture
(HPCC’s)
http://hpccsystems.com/

http://www.geeklawblog.com/2011/12/lexis-advance-platform-launch-two.html

Text+ Technology Mashups

Text analytics generates semantics to bridge
search, BI, and applications, enabling next-
generation information systems.
Semantic search Information access
(search + text) (search + text + BI)

Search based Search BI
applications
Integrated analytics
(search + text +
(text + BI)
apps)
Applica-
Text analytics tions NextGen
(inner circle) CRM, EFM, MR, mar
keting, …

Social Sources

Dealing with social
sources requires
flexibility, data/con
tent
sophistication, and
timeliness.

Sentiment Analysis

“Sentiment analysis is the task of identifying positive
and negative opinions, emotions, and evaluations.”
-- Wilson, Wiebe & Hoffman, 2005, “Recognizing Contextual Polarity in
Phrase-Level Sentiment Analysis”

“Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is the
computational study of opinions, sentiments and
emotions expressed in text… An opinion on a feature f is
a positive or negative view, attitude, emotion or
appraisal on f from an opinion holder.”
-- Bing Liu, 2010, “Sentiment Analysis and Subjectivity,” in Handbook of
Natural Language Processing

Intent Analysis

http://sentibet.com/

http://www.aiaioo.com/whitepapers/intention_analysis_use_cases.pdf

Complications

Sentiment may be of interest at multiple levels.
Corpus / data space, i.e., across multiple sources.
Document.
Statement / sentence.
Entity / topic / concept.
Human language is noisy and chaotic!
Jargon, slang, irony, ambiguity, anaphora, polysemy, synonym
y, etc.
Context is key. Discourse analysis comes into play.
Must distinguish the sentiment holder from the object:
“Geithner said the recession may worsen.”

Milestones Re-viewed

✔ Language+ understanding.
Text, speech, and video.
✖ Narrative, discourse, and argument.
✔ Information extraction.
✔ Knowledge structuring and integration.
? Inference; synthesis.
Language generation.
Conversation; interaction; autonomy.
≈> Convergence, a.k.a. Singularity

Text Tech Initiatives

Now and near future.
• Broader & deeper international language support.
• Sentiment analysis, beyond polarity.
Emotions, intent signals. etc.
• Identity resolution & profile extraction.
Online-social-enterprise data integration.
• Semantic data integration, Complex Data.
• Speech analytics.
• Discourse analysis.
Because isolated messages are not conversations.
• Rich-media content analytics.
• Augmented reality; new human-computer interfaces.

A Focus on Information & Applications

Now and near future.
• Signal detection.
Sentiment, emotion, identity, intent.
• Semanticized applications.
Linkable, mashable, enrichable.
• Rich information.
Context sensitive, situational.
Σ = Sense-making…

Primary Solution Considerations

Adaptation or specialization: To a business or cultural
domain, information type (e.g., text, speech, images)
& source (e.g., Twitter, e-mail, news articles).
By-user customization possibilities: For instance, via
custom taxonomies, rules, lexicons.
Sentiment resolution: Aggregate, message, or feature
level. (What features? Topics, coreferenced entities?)

Primary Considerations, cont.

Outputs: E.g., annotated
text, models, indicators, dashboards, exploratory data
interfaces.
Usage mode: As-a-service (via API) or
installed/hosted/cloud.
Capacity: Volume, performance, throughput.
Cost.

Software & Platform Options

Text-analytics options may be grouped generally.
• Installed text-analysis application, whether desktop or
server or deployed in-database.
• Data mining workbench.
• Hosted.
• Programming tool.
• As-a-service, via an application programming interface
(API).
• Code library or component of a business/vertical
application, for instance for CRM, e-discovery, search.
Text analytics is frequently embedded in search or
other end-user applications.

Analytical Assets (Open Source)

>>> import nltk
>>> sentence = """At eight o'clock on Thursday
morning... Arthur didn't feel very good."""
>>> tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(sentence)
>>> tokens
['At', 'eight', "o'clock", 'on', 'Thursday', 'morning',
'Arthur', 'did', "n't", 'feel', 'very', 'good', '.']
>>> tagged = nltk.pos_tag(tokens)
>>> tagged[0:6]
[('At', 'IN'), ('eight', 'CD'), ("o'clock", 'JJ'), ('on', 'IN'),
('Thursday', 'NNP'), ('morning', 'NN')]

http://nltk.org/
tm: Text Mining Package
A framework for text mining
applications within R.

Providers 1 (non-exhaustive) –

Human analysis.
Converseon (to date).
KD Paine Associates.
Synthesio.
Human crowdsourced:
Amazon Mechanical Turk.
CrowdFlower.


As-a-service:
AlchemyAPI.
Converseon ConveyAPI.
OpenAmplify.
Saplo.
Software libraries:
GATE
LingPipe.
Python NLTK.
R.
RapidMiner.


Financial markets applications.
Digital Trowel.
Dow Jones.
RavenPack.
Thomson Reuters NewsScope.


Other-domain applications.
Attensity. Clarabridge.
Crimson Hexagon. Expert System.
IBM. Kana/Overtone.
Lexalytics. Medallia.
NetBase. OpenText/Nstein.
SAP. SAS.
Sysomos. WiseWindow.

Knowledge Extraction from Social Media

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