[Air-l] back to 1984

[Ellis Godard]

A friend who works for a Washington-state software company of some reknown,
and who has worked on natural language processing for them for many years,
said (with permission to share it):

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I actually worked on exactly this problem (the sentiment analysis part, not
the scarry spooky stuff) for a couple of years, until very recently. It
works fairly well - if you're willing to miss out on a few low-confidence
cases, you can get pretty good precision in evaluating the sentiment of a
sentence / article. (For obvious reasons, it's important to businesses to be
able to track what people like & don't like about things). I don't really
know that we're back to 1984 though. I mean, they're talking about
monitoring publically available sources, i.e. things that people published.
If they start running this on my e-mail, of course (and given events in the
recent past this doesn't seem completely unlikely), then I'm not
particularly psyched about it, but it's the fact that they're doing ANYTHING
on my mail that I'm unpsyched about, not the sentiment analysis in
particular.

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See also:
http://research.microsoft.com/~anthaue/pulse_paper.pdf

-eg