Internet is increasingly becoming a new channel for stakeholder-company relations. We find ourselves before a new information ecosystem, where the power of stakeholder opinion multiplies several fold. This has been one of the conclusions of the workshop entitled, “Semantic analyses, challenges and opportunities for managing communication and reputation in the online environment”, which has brought together the highest experts on the topic of Semantic Analysis with teams from the member companies of Corporate Excellence – Centre for Reputation Leadership.

The high volume of information available, the immediacy with which it is disseminated, connectivity and content interrelations are factors representing significant challenges for managing and measuring the reputations of companies on the net. According to Miguel Lucas, Technologist and Consultant at Llorente & Cuenca, the same volume of information (5 exabytes) was generated in two days in January 2011 as from the beginning of time through to 2003. This volume of information, which is increasing all the time, is impossible for the human being to digest. For Lucas, it is essential to put machines to work, but to do so “we have to teach the machines to do things that they do not know how to do today or they do in a very constrained way.”

Surfing on internet and identifying when, how and why a company is being talked about is a difficult task and although search engines are progressively incorporating language processing techniques, many of the problems this represents are as yet unsolved, making this a matter being addressed by many research teams worldwide. On this issue, Julio Gonzalo, a member of the Spanish National Distance-Learning University (UNED) Dept. of Computer Languages and Systems states that “for the time being we are actually unable to automatically understand the semantic meaning of a message, but we are getting closer and if we do manage to achieve this, we will be facing a revolution that would completely change the communication paradigm: Once we have that potential we will be able to assimilate all messages and extract new information”.

Adolfo Corujo, partner and Online Communication Director of Llorente & Cuenca, discussed the project known as LIMOSINE (Linguistically Motivated Semantic Aggregation Engines), the most recent research in this field to progress in basic research into the analysis of online expressions and their applications in business, being undertaken by the NLP & IR-UNED Group, Amsterdam, Glasgow and Trento universities, Yahoo’s Barcelona Media Research and Llorente & Cuenca.