The amount of digital text that is produced nowadays is unrelenting: we are bombarded with newspaper articles, e-mails, whatsapp messages, tweets and status updates. Never before have more pieces of information and opinions been published than today. And there is no-one that can contain the totality of the knowledge that is encoded in this massive amount of language and text. But with the help of automatic text analytics we can leave this task to the computer: it is this kind of technology that is developed by Textgain, a spin-off of the CLiPS research group (Department of Linguistics - Faculty of Arts).
Textgain offers a lightning fast API that can perform linguistic analyses in real time: you can find out what language a text is written in, its text type or what the most important keywords of the message are. Textgain’s sentiment analysis for a wide range of languages additionally discovers whether someone is communicating positively or negatively about a specific product, service or concept. With such tools at your disposal, you instantaneously transform Twitter into a survey service that observes and measures opinions on a global scale.
And the technology can even read between the lines: personal writing style reveals a lot about a person’s demographic features. Textgain offers text analytic modules that can make an educated guess regarding an author’s gender, age, level of education and even personality type. Combined with sentiment analyses, this type of author profiling technology provides data that are invaluable to e-marketeers, digital publishers and data miners in general.
Textgain also develops custom-made text analytics solutions: in collaboration with Treecompany, Textgain monitored and analyzed the public debate on education on social media. They also developed a system that identifies jihadist propaganda on social media. In the years to come, Textgain will continue to market their technology and know-how in the domain of Big Data and cognitive computing in a variety of sectors, ranging from marketing to cybersecurity.
Textgain was established in 2015 by dr. Guy De Pauw, dr. Tom De Smedt and prof. dr. Walter Daelemans and markets the technology developed at the CLiPS research center (Faculty of Arts).
