efficient Syntactic Analysis for Large-scale Sentiment Analysis

Descrizione del progetto

Ampliare l’ascolto della rete per le piccole imprese

Conoscere l’opinione dei clienti sui propri prodotti è fondamentale per qualsiasi azienda. Il progetto SALSA, finanziato dall’UE, si propone di migliorare gli strumenti di ascolto della rete e sentiment analysis per fornire dati con maggiore precisione e a costi inferiori. A tal fine, i ricercatori sfrutteranno i modelli e gli algoritmi sviluppati dal precedente progetto FASTPARSE per creare il primo motore praticabile di sentiment analysis basato sull’intelligenza artificiale e guidato dalla sintassi. Questa soluzione di intelligenza artificiale sarà in grado di dedurre opinioni basandosi sull’analisi del linguaggio naturale scritto e di esaminare 1 000 frasi al secondo senza utilizzare modelli che richiedono processori di grandi dimensioni. L’intenzione è quella di creare un software open source che possa essere utilizzato dalle piccole imprese dell’UE e che riduca la dipendenza da costose tecnologie estere.

Obiettivo

One of the key aspects of any successful business is knowing how customers feel about its brand and products. For this purpose, sentiment analysis or opinion mining tools could be paramount in helping companies to succeed. However, the current state of the art sentiment analysis solutions (both commercial or academic) present important drawbacks including low accuracy, low performance (response time around 100-1000 ms), high computational cost and/or high price (around €500/month on average) relegating these solutions to consolidated big brands, social listening agencies or consulting firms offering social listening services.

SALSA aims to democratize the analysis and transformation of internet/social data into knowledge creation for decision-makers, making large-scale sentiment analysis technology viable for small entities without massive computational power. SALSA will explore the potential of the powerful models and algorithms developed within ERC Starting Grant FASTPARSE to create the first AI-based syntax-guided sentiment analysis engine which is: a) accurate, due to using syntactic information to infer the opinions contained in each sentence from its structure and the relationship between its words, rather than shallow methods that consider words in isolation and b) cost-effective, due to employing fast parsers that have a throughput in the order of 1000 sentences per second on consumer-grade hardware, and that can work without time- and memory-hungry large language models.

SALSA will follow an open-source software business model in which we will explore several sources of revenue, most based on service-level agreement. This will highly contribute to the competitiveness of the EU technological market by reducing their dependency on the oligopoly of technological giants (mostly American and Chinese) that currently have a dominant position in language technologies, largely thanks to their enormous computational resources.