Answer Me!

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web tool 'as important as Google'

Comments by Nova Spivak (positive) and Boris Katz (negative, surprise!):

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web tool 'as important as Google'.

The tool computes many of the answers "on the fly" by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.

People can use the system to look up simple facts - such as the height of Mount Everest - or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country's GDP.

Other functions solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events. "Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results," said Dr Wolfram.

As a result, much of the data is scientific, although there is also limited cultural information about pop stars and films.

Dr Wolfram said the "trillions of pieces of data" were chosen and managed by a team of "experts" at Wolfram Research, who also massage the information to make sure it can be read and displayed by the system.

First Coverage: NLP for Financial Sentiment Analysis

Local company First Coverage is doing NLP for financial sentiment analysis.  Looks interesting.  Must. Learn. More.

First Coverage.

Using a customized, state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine, we scan thousands of mainstream media outlets and blogs daily. The NLP employs a proprietary financial terms dictionary and configurable scoring system to determine if any article, posting or analysis is negative or positive in nature. With this information, you can: * Leverage sentiment ratings to quickly identify extremely positive or negative media commentary most likely to impact your holdings. * Understand public opinion, sentiment shifts, and changes in the tone of the media, and infuse these variables, which are clearly moving the market, into your investment process for a more holistic perspective. * Create alerts to receive real-time news based on your criteria including sentiment levels. * Read an article, click a link and connect directly with individuals from Wall Street who have relevant opinions or trade ideas. * Be better informed, generate alpha and avoid surprises by efficiently processing information previously ignored or lost in the noise.