Experiments with Mood Classification in Blog Posts

FORMAL REFERENCE:

Mishne, Gilad. “Experiments with Mood Classification in Blog Posts.” 2005. Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2005 Workshop on Stylistic Analysis of Text. Presented at Style2005- 1st Workshop on Stylistic Analysis of Text for Information. CiteSeerX (accessed February 21, 2011).

RELEVANT SECTIONS: All

SUMMARY:
The author performs an interesting analysis of blog posts, hoping to find systematic indicators of mood as self-reported by “mood” tags associated with the posts.

The top 40 most referenced moods were classified by frequency counts of words, length, punctuation, and several linguistic algorithms. A program was run to try to determine the mood based on the algorithms, and across all the words the computer was able to correctly guess mood around 55% of the time. Humans were then asked to perform the same task, and their accuracy was 63%: reasonably close to the algorithm, though significantly higher.

ASSESSMENT:

The author has been frequently cited in other publications. The conference at which this paper was delivered as well as the organization are professional and scholarly, and the analysis methods were extremely thorough… the sample size for the computer analysis was over 600,000 blog posts, though the human assessor may have only been one person—it’s hard to tell. Still, the paper is useful and I do not question is soundness.

The study is imperfect in that many people arbitrarily choose mood tags on LiveJournal.

REFLECTION:

We can only program computers to look for certain traits and patterns, and this study confirms that certain structures and linguistic patterns can be used to very strongly determine mood to a degree nearing a human’s interpretation.

Because punctuation was a large part of the algorithm, we can clearly see that patterns of punctuation have an effect on the interpretation of mood. As exclamations are considered the most emotional punctuation, this can be argued even more strongly.

KEYWORDS AND LABELS:

general punctuation, mood, research

The Psychology of Punctuation

FORMAL REFERENCE:

Thorndike, E.L. “The Psychology of Punctuation.” 1948. The American Journal of Psychology
Vol. 61, No. 2 (Apr., 1948), pp. 222-228. JSTOR (accessed February 10, 2011)

RELEVANT SECTIONS:
pp 222-228

SUMMARY:

Thorndike argues that punctuation conveys more than just grammatical functions like pauses and structure, but instead “influences emphasis, movement, and style. Further, he conducts a study in which he analyzes the punctuation of different authors and finds that each has a unique “punctuation profile” indicative of that person’s writing style.

Further, he believes that English’s changing nature can be seen in even the most basic of language elements, the punctuation… the colon, for example, used to be far more popular but now are only about a tenth as such. Punctuation, then, is not hard and fast but adaptive and qualitative, or as the author puts it, “normative.”

The author concludes that punctuation patterns can be used to determine the topic, the authorial personality, the mood, and the meaning of writing, though he thinks it’s not a good measure of the writer’s total personality. He suggests further tests of the degree to which these punctuation profiles match author personality.

ASSESSMENT:

This article is completely academic and reviewed, and the author is quite renowned. The only drawback is the age of the paper—it’s from 1948. However, this topic Is not really time- sensitive, and thus it’s quite usable.

The study the author performed was done by tabulating punctuation from 50 pages of 400 words each, as a nonrandom sample (picked authors) in order to form a punctuation profile.

REFLECTION:

The revelation that different authors have markedly different punctuation profiles is interesting and hints that personality and other factors like subject and time period are reflected in punctuation choice. If punctuation was just for structure and syntax, one would expect to see much more similarity between authors, times and subjects, but this is not the case.

This article is a good argument for the idea that there are definite things to investigate in punctuation—from emphasis to mood.

KEYWORDS AND LABELS:

punctuation, personality, profiling, research, statistics, mood