Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

BuzzMetric's Matthew Hurst's excellent blog, "Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media," has run some great examples of why sentiment analysis—figuring out the attitudes expressed about a topic—is so damn hard. Here's someone posting about Steve Rubel and Wal-Mart: "Certainly, if you don't post about it, I'm personally not going to not respect you for not doing so, however others may." Let's see a computer make sense of that!

Of course, that's just overly-complex writing that even humans have trouble parsing. But how about this example, drawn from a review of the Su Hong restaurant: "When we moved from the area, my wife's most frequent complaint was that no one made orange peel beef like Su Hong." As Matthew points out, it's a positive review in the form of a complaint.