There are many sentiment analysis tools for smaller businesses, but not so many that will incorporate internal documents and bespoke formats (call-centre records for example). The products listed below will do this, and many provide an API for application integration. Methods used vary, and include text mining, natural language processing and deep learning.
Alchemy API, now owned by IBM provides a SaaS API for organisations to conduct text mining for sentiment analysis and other applications. An on-premises option is also available for businesses with security concerns or other issues associated with SaaS. It supports many text mining functions including entity extraction, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, concept tagging, relation extraction, taxonomy classification, author extraction, language detection, text extraction and several other functions. Alchemy API also offers image processing using deep learning technologies.
IBM Social Media Analytics can access millions of online resources to discover customer sentiment. A SaaS version is also available offering the same functionality with configurable charts and dashboards. The service is available as a monthly subscription based on storage and unlimited users.
MeaningCloud comes with as an Excel add-in and cloud based service. It provides feature level sentiment analysis, supports multiple languages, is easily integrated into other applications and automatically codes and classifies documents of any kind. It comes with a generous free plan, and fees are based on usage.
OpenText Sentiment Analysis uses a classification engine to identify and evaluate subjective patterns and expressions of sentiment within textual content. The analysis is performed at the topic, sentence, and document level and is configured to recognise whether portions of text are factual or subjective and, in the latter case, if the opinion expressed within these pieces of content are positive, negative, mixed, or neutral.
Salience is an on-premises, multi-lingual text analysis engine, and the company claims to be the first company to bring sentiment analysis tools to market. It supports sentiment analysis, named entity extraction, summarisation, content extraction and provides a set of low-level text operators. It’s a sophisticated product allowing users to adjust sentiment analysis to fit specific industry sentiment vocabulary, and users can get up and running quickly out of the box.
SAS Sentiment Analysis uses statistical learning with advanced linguistic methods to hone in sentiment in text data. It automatically extracts sentiment in real-time, with built in reports showing patterns and detailed reactions. It monitors internal and external data sources (Twitter and Facebook for example) to show where comment is being generated and what is being said.
Semantria utilises the well regarded Lexalytics engine (it’s a Lexalytics business) for text and sentiment analysis. Semantria for Excel is perhaps the only text and sentiment analysis tool for Excel, capable of monitoring and visualising Twitter, Facebook, surveys and other text data. Functionality includes entity extraction, categorisation, sentiment analysis and clustering. A cloud hosted version provides similar functionality using a RESTful API. Libraries are provided for C++, JAVA, PHP, .NET, Python, Ruby and JS.