Thursday, April 8, 2021

Sentiment Analysis and Keyword Extraction using Sitecore PowerShell and Microsoft Cognitive Text Analytics

Sitecore Hackathon 2021

Well...wow, it actually happened...

I managed to snag a category win for the 2021 Sitecore Hackathon! 😅


This year, I unexpectedly flew solo as my team members could not attend (both due to completely understandable reasons).  Luckily for me, one of this year's categories, in particular, made me feel like I stood a chance: "Best use of Sitecore PowerShell Extensions to help Content Authors and Marketers."

YES. YES YES 1000x YES. 

Knowing that I needed to land on something fairly quickly to complete all submission requirements (a completed module with clean code, reliable installation instructions, a well-documented README.md, and a video) my evening began with a brainstorming session listing all possible routes I could take for the next 24 hours.  

I actually landed on a similar concept I posted about a couple of years back; interacting with Microsoft's Cognitive Services using PowerShell, then focusing on content translation. I knew Microsoft had continued to update their API offerings since that post, so I started digging into what was new.  I stumbled upon the Sentiment Analytics API, which seemed like an excellent use case that could satisfy the 'help Content Authors and marketers' category requirement.  

By providing the right combination of SPE user interactivity (modal dialogs, accessibility of the utility in the Ribbon, etc.), I could build a utility that analyzes content from a given field and provide a sentence-by-sentence breakdown of the content's sentiment score using AI.

After playing around with the example APIs in the browser, I decided to create my Text Analytics Cognitive Service in Azure, grab my API keys, and fiddle around with the API further in PostMan.  At that point, I felt pretty confident that I could integrate this with SPE. 🤞

The Sentiment Analyzer would

  • Analyze the sentiment of field content directly in Sitecore.

  • Give Content Authors the ability to run an analysis of a given field's content, which returns an overall sentiment score and a sentence-by-sentence breakdown of each sentence's sentiment score and corresponding confidence scores.

  • The results are displayed using a Show-Result modal and rendered in an easy-to-digest format.

I built the user dialog, wrote code that generated the appropriate POST data to be passed to the sentiment API endpoint, built the functions to render the data (using emojis, of course 👩‍🚀), configured a new Sitecore template and the corresponding item for API key storage then tied it all together into an SPE module that exposed the tool from the right-clicked Context Menu, and from the Ribbon.

As midnight approached, I felt that I was in decent enough shape with the Sentiment Analysis script, I could begin exploring using another API in the same Text Analytics product group. I moved forward with a second tool utilizing the API's keyphrase extraction feature without a tremendous amount of overhead; mostly endpoint changes, JSON parsing, and data rendering differences. 

The Keyword Analyzer would:

  • Analyze a field's content to extract critical keywords/phrases.

  • Give Content Authors the ability to analyze a given field's content which returns a list of extracted keywords that can then be used to manually populate a meta keywords field.

  • The results are displayed using a Show-Result modal and rendered in an easy-to-copy format. 


I got started, but a couple hours later...


Then a few hours later...

I spent most of the day (alongside juggling sick-kids priorities) polishing the scripts I had so far; resolving logic issues, error prevention, adding code comments, and overall meticulous code clean-up.

Eventually, I had a functional set of utilities. 

Buttons in the Ribbon configured in the SPE module.


Dialog when clicking either utility against an item
with a Single-Line, Multi-Line, or Rich Text field. 

Sample output of sentiment analysis

Sample output of keyword analysis

I made sure to stop by for a late morning Coffee Break. ☕


I built the final structure of the SPE module using the Module Wizard 🧙‍♂️ to configure my integration points.  The module also stores the API Settings item, so swapping in an API key would be seamless for anyone who installs the module.  


⚡ The module looked like this in the tree:




I spent the final hours of the event packaging the module/testing the installation steps before working on multiple documentation phases (using Markdown for absolutely everything in 2020 was really coming in handy).

It wasn't long before a mid-afternoon Twitter update:



The video production was probably one of the most challenging parts of this experience.  After writing a short-handed verbal script, I tried to record the entire demo in a single recording.  I used OBS Studio to record and the built-in Video Editor in Windows for post-production.  I even squeezed some personal music snippets I composed some time ago without risking Copywrite strikes on YouTube. 😂

The video submission can be viewed here:

By around 5 PM, I was done and had submitted my entry 🚀

The full Github submission can be found here, including the full source code for both scripts, the module ZIP for installation, and installation steps. 

Take it for a spin if you care to! 🤹‍♂️

I'm really humbled and proud to have been a part of the winner's circle this year.  Another big shout-out to the folks who run and judge the event, as well as a big congratulations to the other category winners!

Check out the complete 2021 Sitecore Hackathon winners announcement here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEOy7lIDZUU

I'm already looking forward to next year. 📆


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