The Huffington Post’s first business acquisition has not brought a blog or media site under its umbrella, reports TechCrunch, but a technology startup.
Adaptive Semantics provides a ‘semantic analysis engine’ already used by HuffPo to help moderate the staggering 100,000 comments posted on the site every day.
“Technology is very critical to us,” says CEO Eric Hippeau. “In this case, the technology has implications for our content. It makes moderation hyper-efficient.” With close to 3 million comments a month, the only way to moderate them is through automation tools (as well as a corp of about 30 professional human moderators).