Resumen
In recent years, the Web has created a bull market in human opinion: movie reviews, product ratings, restaurant recommendations, and all kinds of other viewpoints expressed in articles, blogs, discussion groups, and elsewhere. For many businesses, customer opinions have become a type of virtual currency that can make or break their products. The distinction between facts and opinions might seem clear enough on the surface, but in practice teasing them apart involves parsing many linguistic shades of gray. For consumers, the most obvious applications for sentiment analysis involve enhancing search engines with more opinion data. As sentiment analysis finds its way into the business mainstream, vendors will likely continue to develop similar services that bring sentiment analysis into the IT mainstream. Once that integration starts to happen, companies will be able to feed opinion data into core business processes that can help them strengthen their customer relationships -- and, ultimately, boost profits: a decidedly unsentimental goal.