Last year IBM and Twitter announced a partnership that
seemed like an unlikely pairing at first. What did the microblogging
service have to offer the legacy IT company that's reinventing itself as
a data-and-services outfit?
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The answer: IBM planned to use Twitter as a source of information for
its Watson analytics services and enable businesses to mine Twitter for
sentiment and behavior data. The fruits of that partnership, Insights for Twitter, is now available as a service hosted on IBM's Bluemix PaaS.
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Insights works like most Watson-powered services in the Bluemix catalog.
Users submit requests via an API -- in this case to search a store of
harvested Twitter data updated in real time and going back as far as
November 2013.
IBM
IBM's Insights for Twitter uses Watson to perform sentiment analysis on
tweets, although the accuracy of the results is still a work in
progress. Here, "legal" is highlighted as a positive sentiment term, but
the context is more neutral.
The requests can be as simple as a search term, or they can involve
sentiment analyses. For example, a company might seek out all the tweets
about a given brand that are positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent
(equally positive or negative).
IBM offers a sample application, although
the results hint that the accuracy of Watson's sentiment analysis is
still a work in progress, and will perhaps need to be tuned over time as
Watson ingests more Twitter data. Searching for "Microsoft" using
positive sentiment analysis turned up many terms that, in context,
didn't really have a positive sentiment. For example, "legal" was
considered a positive sentiment term, even though in the context of a
tweet the word was actually more neutral. (It's also not yet clear how
well sentiment analysis works in anything other than English.)
Other parsings of the Twitter stream are easier to execute and more
accurate -- e.g., for language, with over 20 languages currently
supported.
IBM claims that Insights does more than just leverage the data in
Twitter, it combines that data with other analytics, "such as weather
forecasts, sales information and product inventory stats," processed by
way of other Bluemix services.
Right now the Insight service lets users search up to 1 million tweets
for free, which is in line with the early stages of all IBM's
Watson-powered services being offered for free while IBM works out a
long-term monetization model.
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Hello, my name is Mohd Azahar. I'm a self-employed Pivrate from the India.
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