What Happened When I Ran Azure Text Analytics Against My Blog Posts

Text analysis is very important for many businesses and can provide a wealth of useful information. Traditionally, having a system that did this meant developing a text analysis system from scratch. With many services providing text analysis as a service (such as Azure Cognitive Services), having a text analysis system is easier than ever.

Text analysis can take many forms. It can include:

• Sentiment – determines whether the text is positive or negative.
• Named Entity recognition – finds different entities in text and categorizes them into predefined classes or types such as a person, location, event, product, and organization.
• Key phrases – identifies important terms from within the text.
• Personal information – finds identifying information such as name, email, phone, address, etc.
• Text summarization – creates a summary of the analyzed text

To test out Azure Text Analytics, I built a simple system that looked at two aspects of my blog posts:

• Determine whether my posts are positive or negative
• Find named entities within my posts

Building the Text Analysis System

Building this system is quite simple.

1. Create a .NET Console application.
2. Add NuGet package (dotnet add package Azure.AI.TextAnalytics –version 5.0.0).
3. Create a client.
4. Call AnalyzeSentiment (gives us the positive/negative).
5. Call RecognizeEntities (gives us the most common entities).

 

Running the System Against My Posts

The system performed a FOR loop over all my blog posts, running the text through the AnalyzeSentiment and RecognizeEntities methods.

So what did it find?

When it comes to sentiment, I am happy to say my blog posts rate mostly positive (although I wish they were a little more positive).

For named entities, Azure Text Analytics returned pretty much what I expected.

Text analysis has a lot of uses and is a handy tool for many applications. Building a complete text analysis solution from bare metal would be a massive undertaking, but Azure has much of that covered with their cognitive services.