New Product Enhancement Announcement Wednesday January 11th, 2023, Atlanta, GA –  Vital4, an award winning, technology company and provider of AI driven data used for background screening and to help fight financial crime, has released to market the first of its kind proprietary sentiment analysis technology to reduce false positives in Adverse Media by fifty percent or more. Kristin Stafford, Co-Founder and CEO of Vital4 stated, “Everyone that has used an Adverse Media tool has had similar experiences and challenges and the #1 problem is false positives. The mounds of information that users must weed through is never ending and they feel like they are looking for a needle in a haystack. We have been laser-focused on solving this problem for the industry.”   

What is Sentiment Analysis?  

Sentiment analysis is an analytical technique that uses statistics, natural language processing, and machine learning to determine the emotional meaning of communications. The process computationally identifies and categorizes opinions expressed in a piece of text, especially to determine whether the writer’s attitude towards a particular topic, product, etc. is positive, negative, or neutral. 

For decades the providers of Adverse Media solutions have used a traditional negative keyword search approach to classifying articles, pulling those articles back and storing them in a database. The user then searches a person’s (or an entity’s) name, and the search would look for the person’s name in an article flagged as negative because of certain words that were found in an article, such as killed, convicted, terrorism, kidnapped, etc.  

There are several challenges with this approach. First, the sentiment of the entire article should not be determined just because there are negative words present in the article, or even the sentiment associated with the person being searched, and here are a few examples: 

Jane Doe killed it in her snowboarding competition, or the title of a show, called Murder She Wrote. With the negative keyword approach, both articles might come back in search results, but with sentiment analysis the system knows the difference, and this cuts down on remediation time by 50% or more. 

Vital4’s Co-Founder, President and Chief Growth Officer, Amy Barbieri, said “At Vital4 we wake up every day thinking about how we can create solutions to solve our customer’s biggest problems and how can we do it with technology. We realized that out-of-the-box solutions for sentiment analysis just haven’t evolved enough to make an impact to justify the time and expense – we didn’t want to just put a band aid on the problem, we wanted to truly solve it. So, we took a different approach and built the first of its kind proprietary sentiment analysis that reduces false positives by 50% +. This eliminates articles that truly don’t belong in our database as adverse articles.”  

About VITAL4SEARCH: 

The powerful search platform, Vital4Search, was built with a “tech first” approach anchored by AI and Machine learning and is the world’s fastest and most accurate proprietary data search technology on the market today. Vital4Search solves enterprise compliance problems by eliminating slow update cycles, shallow source pools and reducing the human error risk of manual legacy processes. Vital4 provides data solutions to thousands of users in banking, gaming, identity, gig economy, GRC, legal, insurance and the largest background screening companies in the world put their trust in Vital4.