Yes true - see Metavana (embedded into Salesforce.com's marketing cloud)
Metavana is able to identify and measure sentiment as expressed through social media (such as Twitter). They're among others able to identify the polarity (positive, neutral or negative) from literal statements, and they're special (the only one's capable) to also:
- measure the force of the signals (measures of causation are far more important that observing mere correlation); and
- interpret polarity for figurative statements.
The Metavana approach (science) operates in real time, and requires to a priori assumption (bias) - so in other words, one does not need to know what one is looking for in order for the platform to identify actionable knowledge.