Extracting Opinions and Facts for Business Intelligence
Résumé
Finding information about companies on multiple sources on the
Web has become increasingly important for business analysts. In particular,
since the emergence of the Web 2.0, opinions about companies and their services
or products need to be found and distilled in order to create an accurate
picture of a business entity. Without appropriate text mining tools, company
analysts would have to read hundreds of textual reports, newspaper articles, forums'
postings and manually dig out factual as well as subjective information.
This paper describes a series of experiments to assess the value of a number of
lexical, morpho-syntactic, and sentiment-based features derived from linguistic
processing and from an existing lexical database for the classification of evaluative
texts. The paper describes experiments carried out with two different web
sources: one source contains positive and negative opinions while the other contains
fine grain classifications in a 5-point qualitative scale. The results obtain
are positive and in line with current research in the area. Our aim is to use the
result of classification in a practical application that will combine factual and
opinionated information in order to create the reputation of a business entity.