
IBM Watson Tone Analyzer - mrestko
https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2015/07/16/ibm-watson-tone-analyzer/
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jboons
My initial impression is it doesn't seem analyze groups of words very well. It
will pick emotional words out of the middle of a sentence and apply the
emotion to the whole text, when the context of the sentence changes the
meaning of the word.

Quick example, "I hate your guts and I hope you die." \-- Hope is picked out
and noted as cheerful.

~~~
kristopolous
my frustrometer project, which does the same thing and predates this by a few
years (albeit less flashy), at
[http://frustrometer.com/](http://frustrometer.com/) can handle that fine.

I didn't finish all the build out, because I got really cold feet in the early
pitches ... moved on to other things

should I get back on this? It's always so hard to tell if discouragement is a
true representation or just people being internety. I also grossly lack self
confidence. I don't know if I need pills, therapy, or what.

~~~
arcameron
Keep building it. Especially if it interests you. It interested you enough to
start it in the first place! Just don't build it with the expectation that
you'll garner fame or fortune.

I imagine a lot of people could use some kind of OSS sentiment detection, even
if it's not perfect.

Try therapy before pills

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andrewtbham
Looks like it's doing emotional classification. Seems more geared towards a
single word approach versus strong contextual classification.

The synonyms for acknowledge on their example are not very good.

Here is a link to the demo to test it out yourself. [http://tone-analyzer-
demo.mybluemix.net/](http://tone-analyzer-demo.mybluemix.net/)

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muglug
It doesn't deal with negation very well – the phrase "I have never had a sad
day with you" is marked as negative because it contains the word "sad".

~~~
joefkelley
I also noticed this, and it seems like a pretty big flaw. It analyzed one of
my emails as very confident because it saw the words "clear" and "sure", but
in context, they were used in the phrases "None of this is clear to me" and "I
am not totally sure"

~~~
akkiraju
We are working on dealing with negation. Our next update will have this
capability.

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PaulHoule
I think IBM really inspired people with Watson, but they have failed to
productize it and now they are using "Watson" as a marketing label for any
A.I. related technology at all -- be it something very good that they started
work on years ago (Speech Recognition) or something really bad that they
aquired like AlchemyAPI.

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anigbrowl
It's interesting and I will keep it bookmarked for occasional use, but the
classification into emotional, social and writing tones seem very arbitrary.
At least part of the problem is that it seems to be working on single words,
most of which are weighted more toward one classification or another based on
aggregate use rather than any real context. Tools like this rarely seem to do
any analysis at the phrase level, even though phrases of two or three words
often contribute significant substantive or structural context. This is odd
considering that we already have techniques for identifying statistically
improbable phrases as intermediate lexical units (often used for detecting
plagiarism).

Is anyone aware of work going on in this area? I'm quite interested in lexical
analysis, but I'm wary of investing a lot of time just to reinvent the wheel.

~~~
andrewtbham
Yeh there is a lot of work going on in this area... check out all these
lectures and the papers they cite.

[http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html](http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html)

There is a race to create a virtual assistant and do question answering.. the
big players are IBM Watson, Apple w/ Siri, Google, Microsoft w/ cortana,
facebook M, and Amazon Echo.

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ihsw
Is there a way to 're-tone' a message, eg: making someone sound more
aggressive?

Seems like the logical progression, if not full outright automatic generation
of messages.

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eggoa
I've found that playing back a recording at 90% speed can make speakers sound
strangely hostile and sarcastic...

~~~
anigbrowl
Heh. Makes sense, as people tend to speed up their speech when they're
nervous, and become nervous in response to deliberate speech modulation of the
sort you describe.

To the GP I'm sure you could 're-tone' many messages, but as presented here
the results would likely be unsatisfactory. Doing so effectively would require
second- and third-order analysis and now you're getting into Hard Problems.

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yakult
I can see a more advanced version of this being deployed as part of automated
admin packages for commenting sites such as reddit and HN. Any comments of
sufficiently negative tone gets auto-downvote/hidden/flagged, etc.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised if it's already part pf the internal tooling.

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LunaSea
Saying:

You are a retarded goat.

Is apparently a positive sentence.

~~~
multinglets
Take out the "a" and it is.

~~~
bawana
'you are a nice asshole wanker' is also marked as cheerful and agreeable. I
guess it has no clue about sarcasm.

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mpdehaan2
I kind of like it how the example on this page is helping someone make their
email more harsh, when it's already using exclamation points and starting
sentences with "but" and is already heeps of negative.

"We can't blame the economy" is passive aggressive, but it gets coded as
green.

Not being passive aggressive is good, but perhaps writing the sample email in
a way that makes people want to work for this person would be a good idea
instead.

~~~
zeidrich
I'm not sure what you mean "It gets coded as green". It doesn't consider an
entire statement, it considers word choice.

Similarly, it says that green means that it's placed in the "writing tone"
evaluation category, in that it tries to determine whether the writing comes
across as analytical, confident or tentative. More like instructions or
analysis and less like judgment or conversation.

It's better to look at the demo in a different way. I mean, if I put your post
into the analyzer it tells me that it's impassioned, and of that it's not very
cheerful. If I put mine in, it looks very matter of fact. It's more analytical
and matter-of-fact.

The two posts imply that kind of difference in tone, and it's pretty cool to
see.

It's got a way to go, but trying different examples is interesting.

~~~
mpdehaan2
I mean that they are building a tool and the primary example is showing a
typical passive-aggressive business email and the user is trying to make it
worse.

This is a strange reason to write a tool, and perhaps symptomatic of the
corporate culture that sought to produce it.

Teaching people to be nicer would be more interesting, and it's clear it is
not dwelling on the right elements since it neglects to detect the overall
tone of the email as being problematic.

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bpodgursky
Not suggesting that watson is good enough as-is (or anytime soon), but the
implications of a truly reliable polygraph machine would be huge.

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dynomight
I found IBM Watson to be wonderfully competent at absolutely nothing.

