what's your blog mood today?

Just stumbled on a very nice paper called Experiments with Mood Classification in Blog Posts, which, as the title indicates, looks into automatically classifying blog posts by mood, i.e. predicting the blogger's state of mind at the time of writing. Before getting carried away and thinking "wow, computers can do that?", you might ask first what's the importance of this? Well, the obvious benefit I guess is that it provides new insights into automatic text analysis which is the main gate to a whole world of quering and searching and extracting and retrieving data. In the paper, the author says it also has practical applications in "assisting behavioral scientists and improving doctor-patient interaction", but for me this is not exactly clear. Anyway, one of the interesting things in this study is that it depends on a blog corpus compiled from the free weblog service Livejournal, which, conveniently enough, provides its users with an optional field called "current mood". Of course this does not just make the study easier since moods can mean different things to different people, but it also provides first-hand information. According to this initial classification by the bloggers themselves, the first top five blog moods are:

1. amused
2. tired
3. happy
4. cheerful
5. bored

I thought being bored would be higher up in the list a bit. After all, why am I blogging to you about this in the first place? :) just kidding. And of course when you get right down to the textual analysis, other linguistically interesting points come up. For example, there is the issue of the 'semantic orientation' of both the blog post in general and the individual words themselves (mainly verbs and nouns).

Generally, anything that has to do with human emotions is extremely complicated. Therefore, it was not surprising when the author argues that: "the classification accuracy, although low, is not substantially worse than human performance on the same task".

Well, just in case anyone includes my blog in a similar future study, here is my mood now: a little bit jaded, but still entertained, as well as considerably cranky, in addtion to being curious, to an extent confused and probably slightly crazy. Deal with that :)

Mai