• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 11, 2009

OpenAmplify Tuesday will release a tool, TopicIntentions, that aims to help advertisers and ad networks identify consumer intent through its engine OpenAmplify v 1.1. The technology is based on computational linguistics.

TopicIntentions looks at the meaning behind the conversation -- as if two people were talking -- by deconstructing sentences to understand grammar, including subject, verb and object. It lets advertisers mine the intent in content posted across social media sites.

"The technology behind OpenAmplify allows us to understand the meaning of every word the tool comes across in any piece of text content," says OpenAmplify CEO Mark Redgrave. "And if you understand the meaning of every word, there's some really cool data you can assimilate from that text. Intention is just one example."

Redgrave says OpenAmplify has formed a partnership with ad network Lotame to test the technology with behavioral targeting, along with "other opportunities."

Knowing consumer intention can boost performance of behavioral targeting platforms across the social Web by identifying negative or positive connotation in content, among other attributes, according to OpenAmplify CIO Mike Petit. Until now, it's been difficult to understand "intention" in conversations. Limitations on technology have forced advertisers and publishers that target ads to rely on keywords, which doesn't work, he says.

Take the following social network blog post, for example. "My beautiful girlfriend's birthday is this weekend. Should I purchase her a nice necklace this year? Or, we could fly to some island for the weekend." TopicIntentions would identify "intention" in the words "purchase" and "fly" as "buy and "travel," respectively.

It works through the OpenAmplify Web Services, which relies on an application programming interface (API). "You give us the piece of text and we hand you back a XML structure file that lets you know if the content is positive or negative, what they intend to do, and when they intend to do it," Petit says. "It can be linked into ad serving technology, targeting technology, or tag Web pages as you create them on sites."

The tool provides an opportunity for semantic Web developers, allowing a direct connection between topics of discussion and the actions associated with topics in blogs or online posts.