Google Cloud’s Natural Language API gets content classification and more granular sentiment analysis

Google Cloud announced two updates this morning to its Natural Language API. Specifically users will now have access to content classification and entity sentiment analysis. These features are particularly valuable for brands and media companies

For starters, GCP users will now be able to tag content as corresponding with common topics like health, entertainment and law (cc: Henry). Today’s update is making 700 categories available for document classification.

Google says this capability is being targeted at media and publishing organizations. These groups produce vast amounts of content that can be tricky to organize. Content classification automates tagging by comparing the content of a given document against a pre-set list of classification categories. These tags then become searchable and valuable for deeper analysis of trends in readership.

Beyond content classification, Google is also releasing updated sentiment analysis that allows customers to parse the sentiment of individual places or things. Traditionally sentiment analysis is performed on a sentence of block of text. But this more granular analysis will allow users to identify the sentiment of specific words. This presents a valuable use case for brands interested in capturing public opinion related to products or physical locations.