Do you always wonder what people say about you, your brand, or your services in online conversations? Do you want to analyze the content across multiple electronic platforms and gauge the general sentiment of your users?
These are some situations where sentiment analysis or opinion mining becomes important. This requires the application of natural language processing technologies to assess written or spoken language and extract subjective information from them.
Essentially, sentiment analysis determines the attitude of a writer, speaker, or other subject matters and establishes the extent that the expression is unfavorable, neutral, or favorable.
With a sentiment analysis API (Application Programming Interface), you can automatically process extensive quantities of data with minimal delay, high accuracy, and excellent consistency—allowing you to know the predominant public opinion towards your offerings.
We assessed several sentiment analysis APIs based on the following four main factors:
- How it works: We examined how the APIs work to identify opinions expressed in a text.
- API features: We analyzed the core features that make the APIs to extract meaning and insight from data.
- Ease of use: We assessed the ease of using the APIs, especially for beginner developers.
- Price: We reviewed the cost of using the APIs for opinion mining.
Ultimately, we created the following list of top 10 best APIs for sentiment analysis:
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Microsoft Text Analytics
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MeaningCloud Sentiment Analysis
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Twinword Sentiment Analysis
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Tweet Sentiment Analysis API
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Text-Processing API
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Bitext Sentiment Analysis
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Intellexer API
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TextAnalysis
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Lexalytics
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AYLIEN Text Analysis
Top 10 Sentiment Analysis APIs
TL;DR: Here’s a summary table of our findings.
| API | How it Works | API Features | Easy to Use | Price |
| Microsoft Text Analytics | Positive or negative sentiment | Extensive | Yes | Free & varying plans |
| MeaningCloud Sentiment Analysis | Positive, neutral, or negative sentiment | Extensive | Yes | Free & varying plans |
| Twinword Sentiment Analysis | Positive, neutral, or negative sentiment | Extensive | Yes | Free & varying plans |
| Tweet Sentiment Analysis API | Positive, neutral, or negative sentiment | Limited | Yes | Free |
| Text-Processing API | Positive, neutral, or negative sentiment | Extensive | Yes | Free & varying plans |
| Bitext Sentiment Analysis | Positive, neutral, or negative sentiment | Extensive | Yes | Free & varying plans |
| Intellexer API | Positive, neutral, or negative sentiment | Extensive | Yes | Free & varying plans |
| TextAnalysis | Positive, neutral, or negative sentiment | Extensive | Yes | Free & varying plans |
| Lexalytics | Positive, neutral, or negative sentiment | Extensive | Yes | Free & varying plans |
| AYLIEN Text Analysis | Positive, neutral, or negative sentiment | Extensive | Yes | Free & varying plans |
Microsoft Text Analytics
The Microsoft Text Analytics API is a collection of powerful web services that can be applied to analyze unstructured data and derive useful insights.
How it works: The API scrutinizes raw text data for signals about positive or negative sentiment. It returns the detected language (it supports 120 languages) as well as a numeric score between 0 and 1, where 1 indicates the most positive value.
API features: The API is capable of performing four main tasks: sentiment analysis, language detection, entity linking, and key phrase extraction. With the Microsoft Text Analytics API, you can only analyze 5,000 characters for every document. Furthermore, the rate limit is 100 calls per minute.
Ease of use: Microsoft has an extensive collection of online documentation to assist developers in getting their hands dirty with the API. Although cloud-based machine learning algorithms back the API, you’ll not need to bring training data before using it—you’ll just need to provide the text data.
Price: You can test the API using the free tier plan, but you’ll be limited to 5,000 transactions per month. For extensive production workloads, you can switch to the billable tiers, starting from $2 per 1,000 text records.
MeaningCloud Sentiment Analysis
The MeaningCloud Sentiment Analysis API is a powerful tool that can assist you to extract usefulness from different types of unstructured content: documents, articles, social networks, and many others.
How it works: The API assesses the provided text to establish if it expresses a neutral, negative, or positive sentiment. It achieves this by identifying the local polarity of the individual phrases and examining the association between them, which leads to determining the global polarity value for the entire text.
API features: With the MeaningCloud API, you can complete various tasks, including detecting irony in sentences, differentiating whether an expression is a subjective opinion or an objective fact, and identifying opposing or ambiguous viewpoints. The API can also gauge the level of sentiment at the document or aspect-based level in any of its ten supported languages.
Ease of use: The API is easy to use. MeaningCloud has a comprehensive documentation on how to make the most of the API, especially for novice developers.
Price: The API is available for free, but you’ll be limited to 20,000 requests per month. To access more functionality, go for any of the paid plans, which start from $99 to more than $999 per month.
Twinword Sentiment Analysis
The Twinword Sentiment Analysis API is important for discovering the tone of a sentence or paragraph.
How it works: For every text analyzed, the API returns a score that indicates whether the sentiment is positive (above 0.05), negative (below -0.05), or neutral (anything in between). Furthermore, you can design an algorithm that determines your own extent of sentiment, such as below -0.75 is negative and above -0.95 is positive.
API features: Besides the Twinword’s Sentiment Analysis API, the company also has other API tools you can leverage to find out the mood of spoken or written word. These tools include Emotion Analysis API, Text Classification API, Word Associations API, and Text Similarity API.
Ease of use: The API is simple and easy to tweak to suit your specific use case. You can also use the online demo tool to input some text and see the results, allowing you to understand how the API works.
Price: The Sentiment Analysis API is available for free, but you’ll be limited to 500 calls per month. To access extra features, go for any of the paid plans, which start from $19 per month. You can also opt for the Twinword Text Analysis Bundle that allows you to access all APIs in one plan, beginning from $25 per month.
Tweet Sentiment Analysis API
The Tweet Sentiment Analysis API assesses whether social media conversations on a topic or brand is positive, neutral, or negative, enabling you to make appropriate decisions.
How it works: The API allows you to send pieces of text such as Facebook posts or Twitter messages and return the sentiment information alongside a score showing the strength of that probability. It is achieved using natural language processing technologies that divide the text into small chunks that are compared with a huge database of human-rated stored data.
API features: The Tweet Sentiment Analysis API has barebones features that allow you to incorporate sentiment analysis into your app.
Ease of use: The API is very easy to use. With just a few lines of code, you can start determining how people perceive your brand, and how that changes with time.
Price: The API is free to use.
Text-Processing API
Text-processing is a simple API that allows you to use text mining and natural language processing technologies to extract meaning behind text data.
How it works: The Text-Processing API utilizes text classification processes to identify whether the provided text portrays negative, neutral, or positive sentiment. The sentiment tool is based on classifiers trained using both twitter sentiment and movie reviews data sets; therefore, providing raw text like the original training data will give more precise results.
API features: Besides sentiment analysis, the API also offers other functionalities, including stemming, phrase extraction, named entity recognition, as well as part-of-speech tagging and chunking. It supports 17 languages.
Ease of use: The API utilizes a simple HTTP protocol with JSON format that is easy to implement on applications. There are also text processing demos you can use to learn how the API works.
Price: The Text-Processing API is open sourced and free for non-commercial use, but limited to 1,000 calls per day per IP. You’ll need to register for a paid plan to access higher limits.
The Bitext Sentiment Analysis API allows you to find out whether the opinion depicted in a text is negative, positive, or neutral.
How it works: To deliver proper results on sentiment analysis, the Bitext API uses deep linguistic analysis. This technique mines as several opinions as the analyzed sentence contains, without being restricted to extracting one opinion per sentence. Furthermore, the API uses the robust parsing technology to carry out analysis both at the sentence level and at the phrase level inside the sentence, which enhances the accuracy of the results.
API features: Besides sentiment analysis, the Bitext API is also capable of detecting the topic of the sentiment, gauging the intensity in sentiment scoring, performing entity extraction, and carrying out concept analysis. The API currently supports eight languages.
Ease of use: Bitext has a 24/7 customer support department to handle any issues. Therefore, this greatly enhances its ease of use.
Price: Bitext has a free account, but you’ll be limited to up to 0.5 MB of usage. To make the most of the API, you’ll need to go for a subscription option.
Intellexer API
The Intellexer API contains a suite of tools that allow developers to integrate natural language processing as well as text analysis capabilities into their applications.
How it works: The Intellexer Sentiment Analyzer performs efficient and powerful sentiment analysis using a unique hybrid technique that combines linguistic and statistical information analysis together with a set of sophisticated semantic rules. As a result, the API can powerfully analyze different types of expressions, such as context-reliant opinions, domain-reliant opinions, and non-opinion phrases.
API features: Besides sentiment analysis, the Intellexer API can complete a wide range of text analysis tasks, including document comparison, entity recognition, summarization, spell checking, and linguistic processing. Therefore, you’ll have a complete set of text analysis tools to enhance the functionalities of your applications.
Ease of use: In addition to the comprehensive documentation, Intellexer has also created SDKs that can be effortlessly imported into a development environment. This way, you can comfortably start using it.
Price: Intellexer provides a free key for non-commercial use, but it is limited to 5,000 requests. If you want to use the API for commercial purposes, you’ll need to request for a paid key.
TextAnalysis
The TextAnalysis API performs sentiment analysis to determine the extent of polarity and subjectivity expressed in a text.
How it works: The API relies on sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning technologies to carry out sentiment analysis. It analyses the provided piece of text and returns a numeric score of between 0 and 1, which indicates the level of polarity and subjectivity.
API features: In addition to sentiment analysis, the TextAnalysis API can complete a wide range of text analysis tasks, including named entity recognition, text summarization, language detection, word tokenize, and text classification.
Ease of use: There is a demo website for testing the API services. Furthermore, the API creators offer helpful documentations for getting started with the API.
Price: The API is provided for free. However, customized text analysis services are charged.
The Lexalytics Semantria API offers powerful solutions for sentiment extraction and gauging the emotional tone of content.
How it works: The Lexalytics API processes unstructured documents and detects emotive phrases within them. Thereafter, it scores these phrases (from -1 to +1) and then combines them to establish the overall sentiment, positive or negative, portrayed in a document.
API features: Semantria API is capable of breaking apart sentences and phrases to evaluate context, syntax, and semantics. It also combines machine learning and natural language algorithms to perform various text analysis tasks, including theme extraction, intention detection, summarization, and named entity recognition.
Ease of use: The Lexalytics API has whitepapers, documentation, and other helpful resources to assist developers in getting ahead of the learning curve. It also maintains SDKs for the most popular programming languages.
Price: You can access the API’s trial version for free, but you’ll be limited to up to 6,000 transactions. To get higher limits, you’ll need to go for any of its paid plans.
AYLIEN Text Analysis
The AYLIEN Text Analysis API allows you to extract value from a wide range of documents and publications with ease.
How it works: The API leverages the power of natural language processing to mine meaning and insights from documents. It performs document-level, aspect-based, and entity-level sentiment analysis for understanding human-produced textual content.
API features: The AYLIEN Text Analysis API has extensive functionalities to assist developers in deriving useful value from textual data—including sentiment, summaries, categories, and entities. AYLIEN also has a News API for analyzing thousands of streams of news content and Text Analysis Platform API for creating customized natural language processing models quickly. It supports seven different languages.
Ease of use: There are comprehensive documentations and SDKs for incorporating the API into your application in minutes. The documentations are provided in all the major programming languages.
Price: You can sign up for the free trial version and start using the API; though, you’ll be limited to 1,000 calls per day. Better still, you can register for any of the paid versions and access added features.
That’s Rakuten RapidAPI’s list of top 10 best sentiment analysis APIs. We hope you’ll use some of these APIs to extract meaning and insights from data!
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