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Improving online market research, customer relations management, public reaction analysis and search portal development through social sentiment analysis

Summary of the impact

The Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group (SCRG) has developed social science sentiment analysis methods that estimate the strength of positive and negative sentiment in short informal social web text. These methods are encapsulated in the SentiStrength software, which is sold commercially, used commercially to develop socially useful computing applications (e.g., question answering systems, customer relations management systems), used to engage the public in science-related entertaining events, and used for data journalism to inform the public about specific news events. The research includes the development and evaluation of new sentiment analysis techniques that can detect informal expressions of sentiment in social web texts and that can detect the strength of positive and negative sentiment and not just its polarity. The research also includes the development of commercially viable software that includes the sentiment analysis methods.

The research has economic impact by enhancing the performance of commercial software systems, benefitting the owners of these systems (e.g., Yahoo!, Inbenta, Gemius, New Cities Foundation). The research also has economic impact by enhancing the customer relations of companies using sentiment-enhanced customer relations management systems, and with the traffic congestion detection system helping people to get to work on time. It has wide public services impact by helping people to find answers to their questions (via Yahoo! Answers). It has societal impact by supporting newsworthy analyses of social phenomena for the media. It has enhanced cultural life by driving spectacular lightshows during the London Olympics.

Submitting Institution

University of Wolverhampton

Unit of Assessment

Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management 

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Research on natural language processing leading to improved language tests and dictionaries for millions of language learners

Summary of the impact

Worldwide impact on language learners and others has been generated by the development at Lancaster of a ground-breaking natural language processing tool (CLAWS4), and an associated unique collection of natural language data (the British National Corpus, or BNC). Some highlights selected from the primary impacts are as follows:

  • Cambridge University Press has significantly improved the quality of its language learning materials (over 60 books) via key enhancements to its core source material that have been enabled by CLAWS4 and the BNC;
  • The Society for Testing English Proficiency (STEP) in Japan has based a widely-used Language Test (EIKEN) on data analysed by CLAWS4. The EIKEN test is taken by two million schoolchildren every year.

The pathways to impact have been primarily via consultancy and via licencing of software IP. The impact itself is largely on the language learners—i.e. users of products such as the above. There is a secondary economic impact on a UK SME which has licenced our software.

Submitting Institution

Lancaster University

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

GATE: General Architecture for Text Engineering

Summary of the impact

GATE (a General Architecture for Text Engineering—see http://gate.ac.uk/) is an experimental apparatus, R&D platform and software suite with very wide impact in society and industry. There are many examples of applications: the UK National Archive uses it to provide sophisticated search mechanisms over its .gov.uk holdings; Oracle includes it in its semantics offering; Garlik Ltd. uses it to mine the web for data that might lead to identity theft; Innovantage uses it in intelligent recruiting products; Fizzback uses it for customer feedback analysis; the British Library uses it for environmental science literature indexing; the Stationery Office for value-added services on top of their legal databases. It has been adopted as a fundamental piece of web infrastructure by major organisations like the BBC, Euromoney and the Press Association, enabling them to integrate huge volumes of data with up-to-the-minute currency at an affordable cost, delivering cost savings and new products.

Submitting Institution

University of Sheffield

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Mathematical Sciences: Statistics
Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Information Systems

Influencing Research Policy Through Policy Relevant Impact Indicators Derived from the Web

Summary of the impact

The Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group (SCRG) has developed web-based indictors and methods for use in research policy and research evaluation for governmental bodies and non- governmental organisations. The research has impact by providing tools and new types of indicators for policy-relevant evaluations for policy makers and decision makers. The research itself includes (a) the direct production and implementation of new indicators and (b) theoretical research into indicator foundations and tool performance, such as that of the web search engines used for indicator construction. The research has impact on policy making within the United Nations Development Programme by aiding evaluations of its initiatives, and within Oxfam and the BBC World Service Trust. It has impact on policy making at the national and international levels to aid the effective directing of funding to aid knowledge production. It has also has impact on public services by helping Nesta and Jisc to evaluate the success of some of their initiatives.

Submitting Institution

University of Wolverhampton

Unit of Assessment

Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management 

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Information Systems
Economics: Applied Economics

Automatic grammatical analysis enabling advanced text processing in commercial applications

Summary of the impact

Research carried out at Sussex into the automatic grammatical analysis of English text has enabled and enhanced a range of commercial text-processing applications and services. These include an automatic SMS question-answering service and a computer system that grades essays written by learners of English as a second language. Over the REF period there has been substantial economic impact on a spin-out company, whose viability has been established through revenue of around £500k from licensing, development and maintenance contracts for these applications.

Submitting Institution

University of Sussex

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Language Unlocked

Summary of the impact

University of Huddersfield research into corpus stylistics has led to the development of Language Unlocked, a consultancy service that uses linguistic methodologies and interpretative procedures to help public, private, third-sector and non-governmental organisations. Language Unlocked has informed clients' strategic decision-making, communicated their organisational strategies and assisted them in realising long-term goals. Beneficiaries have included Britain's unions, which have reassessed their communications policies; the Green Party, which has revised its policies, manifestos and communications; and a major chemical company, which increased its visibility as a result of carefully worded advertising.

Submitting Institution

University of Huddersfield

Unit of Assessment

English Language and Literature

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

UOA11-08: Reasoning Systems (HermiT)

Summary of the impact

State-of-the-art reasoning systems developed in the UoA have underpinned the standardisation of ontology languages, and play a critical role in numerous applications. For example, HermiT, software developed in the UoA, is being used by Électricité de France (EDF) to provide bespoke energy saving advice to 265,000 customers in France, and a roll out of the use of the system to all of their 17 million customers is planned.

Submitting Institution

University of Oxford

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Computation Theory and Mathematics, Information Systems

Enabling exploration of hidden, contextual knowledge within large collections of documents

Summary of the impact

COnnecting REpositories (CORE) is a system for aggregating, harvesting and semantically enriching documents. As at July 2013, CORE contains 15m+ open access research papers from worldwide repositories and journals, on any topic and in more than 40 languages. In July 2013, CORE recorded 500k+ visits from 90k+ unique visitors. By processing both full-text and metadata, CORE serves four communities: researchers searching research materials; repository managers needing analytical information about their repositories; funders wanting to evaluate the impact of funded projects; and developers of new knowledge-mining technologies. The CORE semantic recommender has been integrated with digital libraries and repositories of cultural institutions, including the European Library and UNESCO. CORE has been selected to be the metadata aggregator of the UK's national open access services.

Submitting Institution

Open University

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Information Systems
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Corpus Research: Its Impact on Industry

Summary of the impact

UCREL (the University Research Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language) has been pioneering advances in corpus linguistics for over 40 years, providing users with corpora (collections of written or spoken material) and the software to exploit them. Drawing together 8 researchers from the Department of Linguistics and English Language and 1 from the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, it has enabled the UK English Language Teaching (ELT) industry to produce innovative materials which have helped the profitability and competitiveness of that industry, and assisted other, principally commercial, users to innovate in product design and development.

Submitting Institution

Lancaster University

Unit of Assessment

English Language and Literature

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Sentic Computing

Summary of the impact

Extracting information and meaning from natural language text is central to a wide variety of computer applications, ranging from social media opinion mining to the processing of patient health-care records. Sentic Computing, pioneered at the University of Stirling, underpins a unique set of related tools for incorporating emotion and sentiment analysis in natural language processing. These tools are being employed in commercial products, with performance improvements of up to 20% being reported in accuracy of textual analysis, matching or even exceeding human performance (Zoral Labs). Current applications include social media monitoring as part of a web content management system (Sitekit Solutions Ltd), personal photo management systems (HP Labs India) and patient opinion mining (Patient Opinion Ltd). Impact has also been achieved through direct collaboration with other commercial partners such as Microsoft Research Asia, TrustPilot and Abies Ltd. Moreover, international organisations such as the Brain Sciences Foundation and the A*Star Institute for High Performance Computing have realised major impact by drawing upon our research.

Submitting Institution

University of Stirling

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Information Systems

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