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Social Pinpoint's Analysis Assistant (AA) acts as your virtual assistant to automate the analysis of qualitative, open-ended feedback using advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology.

The AA gives you a head-start in the analysis of your data and lets you process large volumes of qualitative, unstructured data in real-time, saving considerable time and effort.

It analyses open-ended responses in all participation tools, automatically detecting sentiment, key phrases, named entities and language information.

The AA is automatically activated for all Premium, Professional and Single Project subscription sites. An acknowledgement of use of data is covered in our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

How it Works

The AA uses Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Comprehend, a leading NLP service that uses Machine Learning to help you uncover insights and relationships in your unstructured data.

The AA processes data within the region your data is already stored:

  • Australia/ New Zealand - Data is processed in the AWS Sydney data centre.
  • Canada - Data is processed in the AWS Montreal data centre.
  • USA - Data is processed in the AWS US (West) data centre.
  • Europe - Data is processed in the AWS Dublin data centre.

In the Form tool, you can select which specific questions you want to analyse using the AA. This gives you control in how you use your processing allocation, so you do not waste it answering irrelevant questions (i.e. First name).

When the AA is run, it automatically detects the following information for each response:

  • Status - Identifies whether the AA has completed its analysis (Done), is currently processing it (Processing), or has not processed it (None).
  • Sentiment - Indicates the overall emotional tone or sentiment of a text response, classifying it as positive, negative, neutral or mixed.
  • Confidence Score - Indicates how confident the AA was in determining the sentiment classification mentioned above. The score is based on a scale between 0 and 100%, with a higher number indicating a greater level of confidence.
  • Key phrases - Extracts words or short phrases considered significant in the response.
  • Named entities - Identifies persons, places or things named in the response.
  • Language - Identifies the language used by the participant in the response.

The AA works together with SPP's text-analysis tools.

How to Use

Once the AA is enabled on your site, a new 'Settings' button becomes visible at the top-right of the Analysis section and additional fields are added to the data table.

Clicking the 'Settings' button displays the list of questions that can be analysed by the AA (Short Text and Long Text questions only). You can choose which questions you want to use the AA on by checking the box next to the question to start processing the responses to the question.

Unchecking the box next to the question will stop processing the responses to the question.

Within the data table, the 'Status' field indicates how far along the processing of the data is. It reads 'Processing' if the analysis is still in progress, and 'Done' when it finishes.

After the AA finishes, it adds the results to the data table including the status, sentiment classification, confidence score, key phrases, named entities and language fields.

You can manually override the sentiment classification if you think the AA was inaccurate. To do this, click the button under the 'Sentiment' column of the data table next to the response, and choose the appropriate classification from the drop-down.

If you manually override the sentiment classification of a response, the Confidence Score will automatically change to 100% to indicate that a person has verified the result.

Any updates made in the data of the Analysis section will be reflected in the summary report.

If you need to revert back to the sentiment classification that AA provided. Using the dropdown menu you can choose Auto, and this will revert the classification back to the original sentiment.

Besides changing the sentiment classification, you cannot modify any information the AA has created. However, you can export the data by clicking the 'Export' button at the top-right of the page and selecting the .csv or .xlsx file formats. You can then use this data to perform a more in-depth analysis outside of the platform.

If the responses processed by the AA are long, there may be many results for some fields like 'Key Phrases' and 'Named Entities'. Long results will be truncated in the data table but you can see the full data by clicking the 'Actions' button next to a response, and then selecting 'View'.

This will open a pop-up window that shows all data for the response and allows you to edit the sentiment and tags information.


You can also filter your data based on any of these fields by clicking the 'Show Filters' button and selecting a field to filter on, or sort your data by clicking on a column heading in the data table.

About the Setup

As we must pass your data to a third party for processing, there is some information related to the Assisted Analysis included in the Social Pinpoint section of your Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

The AA is included in all Professional, Premium and Single Project subscriptions and can be used to process 100,000 responses per year free of charge*. On Professional plans, the AA will automatically determine the sentiment of your responses. On Premium plans, the AA will also identify the language used, key phrases and named entities.

All other subscribers must purchase the AA add-on to use the service with their subscription (contact us anytime to learn more).

*For usage beyond the included 100,000 responses, we will charge you in bands of 10,000 responses (contact us for pricing).