Text Analyst Bought by News Publisher

Sentiment analysis firm Adaptive Semantics has been acquired by US paper The Huffington Post.

The paper already held a minority stake in the firm and licensed its technology to monitor its online comments sections, filtering negative and offensive sentiments to make it safer for advertisers. In May, it reported its site had produced 2.8 million comments.

Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, who describes his company as 'one part social network, one part news content site', says 'HuffPo' does not intend to offer Adaptive Semantics' technology commercially, apart from honoring its commitments to existing clients.

Adaptive's co-founders Elena Haliczer and Jeff Revesz will join the new parent as as Project Lead on Social News Technology, and Director of Social News Technology, respectively.

The acquisition is the paper's first. Huffington Post was established in 2005 and has enjoyed a meteoric rise into the US' top ten news sites, with a little more than 13m unique visitors in March. Recent rumours have suggested it might itself be a $360m target for Yahoo! (www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jun/08/yahoo-huffington-post ).

Web site: www.huffingtonpost.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.