In our explorations of social media monitoring firms, one differentiating factor between services is often the ability to parse out sentiment and tone of online conversations found about your brand. This task is performed by sophisticated computer functionality called natural language processing (NLP). It’s not the sexiest topic in the world, but it’s a very important one for public relations professionals, marketers and brand managers to understand.

Fortunately, I caught up with Jeffrey Catlin, the CEO of Lexalytics, an Amherst, Massachusetts-based NLP firm, recently to dive into the subject matter a bit. In this episode of SME-TV we learn what drives natural language processing, what the types of accuracy rates should be expected when using tools that provide the functionality and that Lexalytics has some consumer-facing products on the horizon we can be on the lookout for.

Exploring Natural Language Processing With Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin from Jason Falls on Vimeo.

As a follow-up to the chat with Catlin, I spoke with a couple of my friends in the monitorin