AskUs: An Opinion Search Engine

The proliferation of blogs and social networks presents a new set of challenges and opportunities in the way information is searched and retrieved. Opinions expressed in blogs and social networks are playing an important role influencing everything from the products people buy to the presidential candidate they support. This demonstration presents AskUs, a search engine that highlights opinions about the search results. AskUs analyses the overall sentiment of a document/review, but also identifies the semantic orientation of specific components of the review that lead to a particular sentiment. Thus the results include both the overall tone of the review and a summary of sentiments of the most important features of the item reviewed.