The FINANCIAL -- Social media users are weighing in with their Oscar picks and pans, according to the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab, IBM, and the Los Angeles Times who are measuring social media sentiment related to the 84th Academy Awards.

According to IBM, the project relies on new sophisticated analytics and natural language recognition technologies to gauge positive and negative opinions shared in millions of public tweets.

Focused on the Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Picture categories, the goal is to establish a model for measuring the volume and tone of worldwide Twitter sentiment to better understand moviegoers' opinions. The results are intended to illuminate how advances in technology can help identify important consumer trends.

The Times has published information about the project including an infographic illustrating ongoing sentiment. As social media tools become more prevalent, those participating in the online conversation become increasingly influential, especially as their opinions travel faster and to a wider group of consumers.

The work between the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and IBM is part of an ongoing collaboration to explore how technology can be used by organizations from news outlets and journalists, to movie studios and retailers, in order to better understand, respond, and predict public sentiment.

In the case of the Oscar race, innovative analytics and language software from IBM is being used that distinguishes nuance and sarcasm in order to pinpoint relevant opinions of the nominated films, actors and actresses and show noteworthy trends.

To date, USC Annenberg and IBM have also applied similar techniques to film forecasting, sports and retailing in an effort to identify social media trends and better understand public opinions.

The work between USC and IBM is part of an ongoing effort to broaden student skills in analytics, demonstrating how Watson-inspired technologies can crunch complex data in real-time. Students are helping identify areas for research, experimenting with the software and helping to develop new technologies that mine for insights.

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