Teragram unveils Sentiment Analysis Manager at Text Analytics Summit

Text Analytics Provider Introduces Social Media Analysis Tool for Marketers to Manage Online Opinions

BOSTON - Teragram, a division of SAS Institute Inc. and the leading provider of multilingual natural language processing technologies, today announced the launch of its Sentiment Analysis Manager (SAM), a social media analysis tool that computes the sentiment of digital text and captures relevant information that enables brand managers to see what their end-users are writing about their products. Teragram is launching SAM to bring its self-developed search technologies to marketing professionals to help them better manage their brand’s image in the consumer market.

“The amount of online data from social media, such as blogs and message boards, is growing at a rapid rate,” said Fern Halper, partner at Hurwitz & Associates. “The introduction of the Sentiment Analysis Manager indicates that Teragram understands the value of mining this content in order to gauge brand reputation. Increasingly, companies are looking to these kinds of solutions in order to remain competitive.”

In keeping with Teragram’s practice of providing automated, customizable tools to what are normally manual and error-prone processes, SAM is the industry’s first hybrid system that combines both a statistical method for computing reviews as well as a rules based approach that lets brand managers evaluate specific terms and syntaxes.

SAM automatically computes the review sentiment from mainstream sites such as Amazon and Overstock, as well as social media outlets like blogs and Twitter messages, and captures the overall opinion of the combined assessments. SAM also analyzes the number of stars in a product rating to extract the general consumer reaction to that product, and searches and evaluates both positive and negative phrases in reviews for a more detailed breakdown of these online evaluations. Users can extrapolate this information from SAM to create color-coded graphs to understand exactly what these online posts mean in terms of the overall tone of coverage of their brand.

Sentiment Analysis Manager provides statistical data on the qualitative information that customers post on the Internet. For example, if a brand manager for a cellular phone company wants to gauge the overall consumer sentiment towards a specific model, they would use SAM to calculate the response based on what people are writing about that particular phone. This works in tandem with third party web crawlers, including Teragram’s solution, and analyzes product language such as, “bad reception” and “expensive data plan” as well as feature language like “fast Internet browser” and “clear screen.” SAM extracts key phrases from these reviews and also differentiates when a commonly positive or negative word is used in the opposite tone such as, “not the best phone on the market.”

“Teragram created Sentiment Analysis Manager so that marketing and brand management professionals can distinguish exactly what their customers are writing about their products in online forums in real time,” said Yves Schabes, president and co-founder of Teragram. “Teragram’s strong base in automatic text analytics and categorization has enabled us to introduce this statistical based, customizable system to an industry that has mostly relied on qualitative research in the past.”

Sentiment Analysis Manager will be available in the third quarter of 2009, and pricing information can be found at http://www.teragram.com/solutions/index.htm or by calling 1-617-576-6800.
About Teragram

Teragram, a division of SAS Institute Inc., is the market leader in multilingual natural language processing technologies that use the meaning of text to distill relevant information from vast amounts of data. Founded in 1997 by innovators in the field of computational linguistics, Teragram alone offers the speed, accuracy and global language support that customers and partners demand to retrieve and organize growing volumes of digital information. Teragram helps customers perform more efficient searches and better organize information in more than 30 languages, enabling them to reach new markets and make better decisions. Teragram serves customers across the publishing, pharmaceutical, telecommunications and financial industries, including Ariba, Ask.com, Associated Press, CNN, Factiva, EBSCO Publishing, eBay, FAST Search & Transfer, Forbes.com, InfoSpace, NYTimes Digital, OneSource, Reed Business Information, Sony, WashingtonPost.com, Wolters Kluwer, the World Bank and Yahoo!. For more information, please contact 1-617-576-6800 or visit http://www.teragram.com/info.
About SAS
SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know® .