Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape ... Full Story »

Posted by Fabrice Florin - via Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times (Most Emailed), Publish2 (Business)

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Review

Christine Ahlstrom
4.4
by Christine Ahlstrom - Sep. 29, 2009

I thought this was a really great article. It is relevant to today's technologically advanced society and it provides really interesting insight into the ways in which computers fall short of the human brain and how people are trying to make computers more "human". I'm really interested in the human psyche and I think this article ties in the complexities of human nature and speech patterns (i.e. sarcasm) that can't necessarily be recognized by computers, even if they are "trained" to look for those subtleties.

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Christine's Rating

Overall
4.4

Good
from 11 answers
Quality
4.3
Facts
4.0
Fairness
5.0
Sourcing
5.0
Style
5.0
Context
3.0
Depth
4.0
Enterprise
5.0
Relevance
5.0
Popularity
5.0
Recommendation
5.0
Credibility
5.0
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