Ethersource monitoring

The Ethersource monitoring solution helps you discover what people think about something you are interested in.

Ethersource has been developed to overcome issues with variability (incoming data is constantly changing), scalability (higher monitoring accuracy requires more incoming data), and efficiency (huge amounts of data require more efficient processing) that typically apply to other monitoring solutions. In the following sections we examine each of the major features of Ethersource and explain how they contribute to improving the monitoring results.

Beyond keywords

The Ethersource monitoring solution is based on concepts rather than keywords. This means that Ethersource automatically understands and includes synonyms, slang expressions, nicknames, codewords, misspellings, and other related terms in the analysis. You don't miss out on information just because you don't know exactly which words other people use. In technical terms, we say that Ethersource ensures recall without sacrificing precision.

All other commercially available monitoring solutions rely on keyword matching, which means that they find only and exactly the terms you enter into the system. This is all well if you really know what you are looking for, but the problem with analysing social media is that people use language in highly productive and unpredictable ways. This is a known fact that has been shown in a number of scientific publications (see our blog post on the matter). If you - or the system you use to monitor social media - cannot keep up with these rapid and unpredictable changes and variations, you will inevitably lose information.

Beyond positive and negative

Ethersource monitoring can be used to track any kind of attitude or opinion. Are you interested in whether people are worried, happy, or angry about something, or are you interested in whether people talk about your product in terms of quality, price, or usability? Do you want to track customer churn or do you need to monitor violence propensity? Ethersource lets you do all this, in addition to the standard positive, negative, and neutral sentiments which are the only analyses offered by other monitoring solutions.

Beyond English

Ethersource can handle any language you want to monitor. English, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Czech, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Amharic; all languages are equally easy for Ethersource. The reason for this is that, contrary to all other monitoring solutions available, Ethersource does not rely on any linguistic resources like taggers, parsers or word lists to process language data. Ethersource learns new language as it goes, and it does so in basically the same way as humans learn language: by observing how language is being used. The only restriction on which languages Ethersource can monitor is availability of data.

Examples of Ethersource Monitoring applications

• Ethersource provides clients in the finance industry with a variety of signals relating to financial assets, for prediction and trading purposes.
• Ethersource monitors and measures the attitudes towards the Greek referendum in Greek language open sources.
• Ethersource measures the buying propensity for certain services in specific sub-markets (will current Volvo customers buy the new Volvo model?).
• Ethersource gives real-time detailed feedback on concepts such as sympathy, disgust, worry, and disbelief, as events unfold during high profile media events (such as Assange's extradiction from the UK, or Sweden's Juholt affair)
• For corporate-due diligence purposes Ethersource searches large multi-lingual databases and retrieves important documents where innocent terms like "commission" and "fee" are used in a context close to the concept of "bribe".
• For threat detection purposes, Ethersource captures, measures, and monitors weak signals of violent chatter in open sources: for example, when Ethersource comes across the snippet the star must be celebrated and - based on previous usage - has learnt that star equals king and celebrate equals kill, this snippet accrues and increases the real-time weak signal violence propensity index (wvpi) for the king. Documents with threatening language are viewable and retrievable through the Ethersource monitoring application.