Attendants at an Amusement Park

As the park guests on the ride scream their lungs out, the attendant operating the ride sits with a calm expression on their face. When it is time to start, the attendant presses the green button. When it is time to stop, the attendant presses the red button. There are other guests in the park who are watching from one side and who are screaming and excited as well. Except the attendant.

It is surprising to see that joy and excitement are essentially associated with 'novelty' and 'leisure'. Once something becomes a habit (for the attendant, the ride and the way it operates is a habit), the joy gets sucked out of it the way a black hole sucks everything in one go. A habit is so regular that it fails to amuse you.

Joy is, hence, in the irregularities of our lives. And what we call 'hobbies' are these irregularities that we like to introduce in our routines so that it brings us joy...

Understanding AI - Sentiment Analysis

Dedicated to my AI teacher, Kavita Kelkar ma'am who introduced me to the field that I love so much now.

'Sentiment Analysis' is a branch of AI, linguistics particularly, which deals with understanding the 'opinion' behind words. It is for this that it seems to have immense potential in business applications.

Sentiment analysis deals with processing text so as to understand what the text says about a particular subject in terms of positive or negative content. So, sentiment analysis would read the sentence 'India beat Pakistan in the cricket match' and present an output that infers that the sentence says something positive for India and something negative for Pakistan.

A first thought is identifying words that say 'good' and 'bad' things. For example, the words 'fabulous', 'marvellous', 'excellent', 'amazing' denote positive opinion while 'dull', 'disappointing' denote negative opinion.

Sentiment analysis, however, goes deeper than words - it enters the world of cognition, the way we think what we think. Sentiments are not conveyed by the presence of mere words .

Consider this very sarcastic statement : "It is amazing to see how the camera makes sure all the photos you take with it are overexposed to light." Now this statement has no word that denotes a heavy negative sentiment. But still the overall opinion is negative.

With so many blogs and review websites coming up, the textual data available is already in abundance and with techniques like these, one would only be able to retrieve 'maximum information' from the data. Sentiment Analysis, thus, turns out to be a very amazing task that will help business houses, product vendors, filmmakers know what people are thinking and saying about their product.

Like, you know, Sentiment Analysis will be able to predict that this blogpost is saying all good things about it! :-)