OpinionMining-ML and SentiTagger

OpinionMining-ML is the name of an XML formalism that I have defined together with Luigi Di Caro for tagging users' opinions on products and services. (Robaldo and Di Caro, 2013) presents OpinionMining-ML with respect to a corpus of 1000 comments taken from www.2spaghi.it, one of the biggest web2.0 sites about Italian restaurants and pizzerias.

In OpinionMining-ML, users' attitudes and sentiments are associated with the objects they are about (called facets). Facets are organized in an ontology, which is part of the formalism, and they are associated with the statements denoting appraisals, suggestions, observations, etc. about them.

OpinionMining-ML has been the basis of the SentiTagger system, a project that has been retained for funding from the Working Capital Accelerator 2014, a Telecom Italia initiative to support new startups and innovative research projects. The selection was highly competitive: only 40 projects out of about 1,300 submitted ones were selected. Each selected project was granted 25,000 euros from Telecom Italia.

SentiTagger was a novel NLP system employing the SDFTagger technology to tag free text in OpinionMining-ML, while indexing the recognized entities and concepts with respect to a reference OWL ontology.

In the context of the WCAP initiative, I participated to ''WCAP 2014 Program'', a two-months intensive seminar series devoted to start-up foundation, pitch preparation, business and marketing analysis, etc., organized in Milan for WCAP 2014 winners. The SentiTagger system has been developed during the two-month course.

However, at the end of the course I did not found a start-up (not yet :-)), in that in the meanwhile I won the project ProLeMAS, and I moved to Luxembourg.