

Announcing: TweetSentiments.com API for Sentiment Analysis - renaebair
http://intridea.com/2010/11/29/sentiment-analysis-using-tweetsentimentscom-api

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waterside81
Speaking as someone who's been working on NLP, sentiment and semantic analysis
for two years now, I've come to the conclusion that sentiment as a product is
useless. There's no actionable conclusion from sentiment alone. You need to
dig deeper, apply part of speech tagging, and determine the underlying intent.

We, too, use SVMs to determine sentiment (in fact, we built a web-based API to
create, train and deploy your own SVMs) but if you're goal is to make money,
then you need more than just "this tweet is positive/negative/neutral".

Marketing folks need to sell an actionable strategy. For example, "People are
speaking positively about your product because they love the packaging" or
"People are speaking negatively about BlackBerry because they can't figure out
how to configure their work email accounts". Both of these give much more
insight than just polarity.

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tomzeng
You are absolutely right, and some of the things you mentioned are in our
roadmap

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waterside81
Cool. Maybe you'd like to talk about this stuff, we might be able to work
together? martin [at] repustate [dot] com

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iampims
Quick suggestion about the API endpoints, versioning is _really_ important as
it allows you to add/remove/update features without breaking any application
using your API. You should add it before anyone starts building on top of your
API.

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generalk
Versioning should _really_ be done with an "Accepts" HTTP header as opposed to
changing a resource's URL.

<http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1566460>

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iampims
In a perfect world, I’d agree with you. The author of the article you linked
to provides a good answer to this problem:

    
    
        If your audience is architecturally minded and aware of REST,
        you should version data representations in the MIME
        types your application accepts.
    
        If your clients view the URL as the most important facet,
        make the URL the center of your versioning efforts.
        Folks who are familiar with versioning with WS-* Web
        services tend to be more comfortable with changing the
        URL when versions change.

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tomzeng
Both approaches should work, putting version in the url seemed to be more
widely used, we will take both in to consideration, thanks for the suggestions

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syllogism
Have you evaluated your model on the standard evaluation sets, and if so, how
does it compare to current state of the art?

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tomzeng
It should be on par with the current state of the art, and we are working on
improving it.

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hipsterelitist
How does this stack up against something like AlchemyAPI
(<http://www.alchemyapi.com/>) which seem to roll in a lot more than simple
sentiment analysis in a far more flexible product?

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tomzeng
At the present, we tend to be more focused on Twitter, and our models built
with tweets. Down the road, we will have a more flexible and comprehensive
offering.

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riffraff
interesting, congratulation for your release. I do think open-uri reads better
than net/http in examples though :)

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tomzeng
Agreed, we can worked that in the future and we are working on a gem to make
things easier.

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jeremyjarvis
Nice. Wonder whether Twitter Analytics will have something like this?

