Technical and theoretical advancements over the past two decades, coupled with open-source software, has fueled an explosion of sentiment data providers. In this report, we provide a lay of the land, focusing on the three key types of sentiment vendors based on underlying source – news content, social media, and investor communications. Within each category, we highlight use cases, trends, and prominent players.

Disclaimer: Experienced users of sentiment data may find more value in our deeper dives into particular sub-categories of data – please see our list of related reading to the right of this page.

1. A QUICK PRIMER ON NLP

Natural language processing (NLP) refers to the branch of computer science — more specifically, the branch of artificial intelligence — related to giving computers the ability to understand text and spoken words in much the same way human beings can (IBM, 2020). Basic tasks that can be carried out using NLP include:

Named entity recognition (NEM) – identifies words or phrases as useful entities.