Umbria Scientists Organize Symposium on Analyzing Weblogs at Upcoming AAAI 2006 Spring Symposia

BOULDER, Colo., March 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Umbria, Inc., a company that analyzes the opinions and perceptions of the online community (comprised of blogs, message boards, chat rooms and other user forums) and turns such comments into market insights, announces the upcoming Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs symposia at Stanford University. Nicolas Nicolov and Franco Salvetti, Chief Scientist and Scientist respectively at Umbria, Inc., are the principal organizers of the symposium, one of the eight to be held during the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's (AAAI) 2006 Spring Symposia at Stanford University.

Blogs are opinionated commentaries on a variety of subjects and analyzing blogs has become increasingly important to businesses as they attempt to tap into the spontaneous opinions of the online community. The informal nature of blogs presents a challenge for understanding natural language, critical in the analysis of the blogs. This symposium will bring together researchers from a variety of subject areas, including computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies, to discuss ongoing research into blog analysis.

The three-day conference will be divided into a series of presentations with topics ranging from how information percolates through mass media and blogs to the ability to predict trends and opinions. A wide range of industries and academic institutions will be represented, including IBM, HP Labs, Google, NEC Labs and Cornell University.

"Analyzing the language found in blogs represents the next challenge for applying what we have learned about natural language processing. However, very little research has been done into the issues that come up when analyzing blogs" said Nicolas Nicolov." This symposium will bring together experts from a variety of fields to open up dialogue into understanding this critical area of communication" said Franco Salvetti.

Umbria scientists Nicolas Nicolov and Franco Salvetti, along with Mark Liberman, University of Pennsylvania, and James Martin, University of Colorado at Boulder, are the organizers. The symposium will be held at Stanford University, March 27-29, 2006. More information can be found at http://www.umbrialistens.com/aaai2006_weblog_symposium.

About Umbria, Inc.

Umbria, Inc. analyzes the opinions and perceptions of the online community (comprised of blogs, message boards, chat rooms, and other user forums) and turns such comments into market insights.

Umbria, Inc. tracks, distills and analyzes the voice of the online community by using proprietary Natural Language Processing and machine learning algorithms to dissect the who, what and why of online opinion-offering in-depth insights into the buzz about companies, brands, products, people, and topics of interest. Umbria provides services for some of the world's leading brands, including Electronic Arts, Scion, Microsoft and many others. For more information on Umbria, please visit http://www.umbrialistens.com/.

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