Search for Sentiment

Seth Grimes
Alta Plana Corporation
301-270-0795 -- http://altaplana.com

Search Engine Meeting

April 27, 2010

Search for Sentiment

Seth Grimes
Principal Consultant with Alta Plana Corporation.

Contributing Editor, TechWebs IntelligentEnterprise.com. Channel Expert (text analytics), B-Eye-Network.com. Founding Chair, Sentiment Analysis Symposium, sentimentsymposium.com, and Text Analytics Summit, textanalyticsnews.com.

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Two assertions:
Human communications are inherently subjective.
Opinion often masquerades as Fact.

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www.google.com/publicdata

Facts and Feelings

The unemployment rate is 9.7%. Unemployment is WAY TOO HIGH!! The unemployment rate is higher than it was two years ago (5.1%). Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Tuesday that the global recession will "surely be the longest and deepest" since the 1930s, adding that the Obama administration's Troubled Asset Relief Program will be insufficient to plug the yawning financial gap. [Reuters, Feb 18, 2009] Bernanke is doing a better job than Greenspan.

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Questions for business & government:

What are people saying? Whats hot/trending? What are they saying about {topic|person|product} X? ... about X versus {topic|person|product} Y? How has opinion about X and Y evolved? How has opinion correlated with {our|competitors|general} {news|marketing|sales|events}? Whats behind opinion, the root causes? Who are opinion leaders? How does sentiment propagate across multiple channels?

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Is sentiment a search problem?

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Information access w/structure, sentiment:

User intent?

Sentiment

Sentiment+

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In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.
-- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-search-options-and-otherupdates.html

In the recap of [Searchology] from Googles Matt Cutts, he tells us that: If you sort by reviews, Google will perform sentiment analysis and highlight interesting comments.
-- Bill Slawski, Google's New Review Search Option and Sentiment Analysis, http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=1488

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For better information access, understand user intent.

User intent?

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We have a decision support need. We=

Consumers Marketers Competitors Managers

Decision support requires tools beyond general-purpose search/information access

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Counting term hits, in one source, at the doc level, doesnt take you far...

Good or bad? Whats behind the posts?

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Counting -clicks, not even keywords -leaves you wondering Why? and So What?

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Sentiment analysis is the task of identifying positive and negative opinions, emotions, and evaluations.
-- Wilson, Wiebe & Hoffman, 2005, Recognizing Contextual Polarity in Phrase-Level Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is the computational study of opinions, sentiments and emotions expressed in text An opinion on a feature f is a positive or negative view, attitude, emotion or appraisal on f from an opinion holder.
-- Bing Liu, 2010, Sentiment Analysis and Subjectivity, in Handbook of Natural Language Processing

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Sentiment analysis turns attitudes into data. Ingredients:

Structured and unstructured sources. Subjectivity WW&H used over 8,000 clues. Polarity: positive, negative, (both,) or neutral. Intensity.

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There are many complications. Simplified:

Sentiment may be of interest at multiple levels.
Corpus / data space, i.e., across multiple sources. Document. Statement / sentence. Entity / topic / concept.

Human language is noisy and chaotic!

Jargon, slang, irony, ambiguity, anaphora, polysemy, synonymy, etc. Context is key. Discourse analysis comes into play.

Must distinguish the sentiment holder from the object: Greenspan said the recession will

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Sentiment sources (broadly):

News Social media Enterprise feedback

Consumption models:
Push Pull (a.k.a. search)
1. 2. 3. 4. General search engine Siloed/vertical search interface Application embedded Widgets/gadgets

Rated negative?

Manual focus

???

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An accuracy aside: [WWH 2005] describes an inter-annotator agreement test.

10 documents w/ 447 subjective expressions. The two annotators agree on 82% of cases.

Excluding of uncertain subjective expressions (18%) boosts agreement to 90%.

(Wilson, Wiebe & Hoffman, 2005, Recognizing Contextual Polarity in PhraseLevel Sentiment Analysis)

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Claim: You fall far short with (only) -Doc-level analysis. Keyword-based analysis.

For text, you need strong natural language processing (NLP) for information extraction:
A direct opinion is a quintuple (oj, fjk, ooijkl, hi, tl), where oj is an object, fjk is a feature of the object oj, ooijkl is the orientation or polarity of the opinion on feature fjk of object oj, hi is the opinion holder and tl is the time when the opinion is expressed by hi. [Liu 2010]

index at will!

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Boost accuracy via ratings & classification:

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Next slides have a few more examples.

A Jodange embeddable gadget. Newssift.com, a now defunct media portal from the Financial Times Group.

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Beyond polarity: We present a system that adds an emotional dimension to an activity that Internet users engage in frequently, search..
-- Sood & Vasserman & Hoffman, 2009, ESSE: Exploring Mood on the Web

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Happy Sad Angry Energetic Confused Aggravated Bouncy Crappy Angry Happy Crushed Bitchy Hyper Depressed Enraged Cheerful Distressed Infuriated Ecstatic Envious Irate Excited Gloomy Pissed off Jubilant Guilty Giddy Intimidated Giggly Jealous Lonely Rejected Sad Scared ----------------------The three prominent mood groups that emerged from K-Means Clustering on the set of LiveJournal mood labels.

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Questions?
Comments?