Elevator Pitch

We had to present a quick 2 minute Elevator Pitch during our class meeting today. Here it is!!

Looking at the Internet as a cohesive entity, with a measureable Point of view, we are aiming to create a web application that measures that POV by performing NLP sentiment analysis. It’s a growing field with uses that include both academic research and business marketing. The ability to quantify and evaluate society’s perceptions is increasingly critical to the success in the marketplace and Sentiment analysis is an approach that can be used to computationally measure perceptions regarding topics based on selected material.

Our goal, with our web app, is to gather content from a variety of sources and to measure and track the collective attitude and sentiment of a representative Internet population on a particular topic. So, how do we do this? We plan to grab our content from a variety of source by scraping Twitter, Top ranked Google hits, online newspapers, etc. We perform a desired variation of sentiment analysis to the aggregated results. (This is where the “research” angle of our project comes in as there are many algorithms to explore.)

Our sentiment analysis engine will be implemented using Python and NLTK (another research part) with results of the analysis being visually presented graphically and dynamically using HTML, JavaScript, Ajax and jQuery.