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the record · 2003 · sentiment analysis

Visualizing the affective structure of a text document

Hugo Liu, Ted Selker & Henry Lieberman (2003). Proceedings of CHI 2003, 740–741, ACM Press.

100 citations
PDFDOI

Poseidon's Eye asks whether the emotional progression of a story can become a navigable document structure. A commonsense model classifies sentences into six emotions plus neutral; Bayesian smoothing, layout boundaries, and discourse cues gather them into larger regions. A colored bar then links each affective region to its place in the text. Four people used four stories each. Event-location tasks were reported 27 percent faster for familiar stories and 36 percent faster for unfamiliar ones than with a uniformly yellow control. That is an intriguing demonstration, but an extremely small one. The affect condition came first, leaving a practice effect possible; color meanings required learning and could vary by culture; and readers sometimes returned to thematic browsing when emotion alone did not identify the passage.

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