Autonomy search tool scans social networks

Autonomy has launched a software solution that has a set of intelligent connectors into social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, RSS and YouTube to provide a single point of search for all user-generated content. The Autonomy Interwoven Social Media Analysis solution listens to the social media content and converts it into actionable business data for chief information officers.

At a time when professionals grapple with traditional monitoring solutions to understand unstructured information on the web, the solution aims at overcoming such challenges by employing “meaning-based computing” technology to help listen, understand and act on social media insight.

Anthony Bettencourt, chief executive, Autonomy Interwoven said: “In the past few years, professionals have struggled to keep pace with the radical shifts taking place in the consumer landscape. Social networks – which by nature are dynamic, unstructured forms of information – do not fit neatly into traditional, database driven analytics systems.

Traditional keyword spotting solutions fails to understand the meaning and conceptual patterns within user-generated content which is more conversational, rife with familiar expressions, slangs and varying emotional undertones.

With the combination of Autonomy Interwoven’s web content management solution and intelligent data operating layer (IDOL), the solution provides clustering, pattern matching techniques and probabilistic modeling that treat words as symbols of meaning rather than simple data points, yielding richer and contextual set of data.
It also offers capabilities for engaging customers in a dialogue and enables professionals to act upon the meaning and insights to deliver compelling, targeted offers to consumers on the web.

Bettencourt said: “The meaning based approach, which derives meaning from human friendly information, form clusters of sentiment – positive and negative – which can be used to identify trends. Businesses can tune the system to track certain thresholds – and automatically take action to capitalise on a new business opportunity, or manage a crisis or threat to the brand – if sentiment exceeds those benchmarks.”

The tool can connect to social networks including Epicurious, Facebook, IMDb, Kbb.com, LinkedIn, RSS, TripAdvisor, Twitter, WebMD, Yahoo! Finance, and Yelp and also to other channels such as call centers, audio, customer relationship management systems and traditional media and video.

For more information on Autonomy's meaning based computing, check the interview of its chief executive Mike Lynch at Autonomy bids for cleverer web content