5 ms·

Show HN: Positive News Reader based on sentiment analysis

84 points by Yeroniomus 9y ago

popey456963 9y ago
Haven't there been several of these posted to Hacker News already? All of which look almost identical. EDIT: Ah, apparently they're all links to this page.
Yeroniomus 9y ago
Hello, Hacker News users! It's my first Android app and first experience of Android development :-). SentiNews is based on sentiment analysis which helps to classify news as positive or negative. What do you think about general concept of the app? Will be waiting for your feedback.
- aplummer 9y ago
  Congratulation on shipping! Regardless of the feedback you've made it a lot further than most. Good luck!
  - Yeroniomus 9y ago
    Thanks a lot for the suggestions and feedbacks to everyone. My nearest plans: small interface redesign, improvement of sentiment analysis algorithm, personalization of news feeds and the iOS launch. Keep on updates!
- oelmekki 9y ago
  Great job, congratulations! My first reaction was : "well, if it's sentiment analysis, it doesn't know anything about if the news is bad or good, only about the mood of writer". But I then realized this is actually even better. I don't want to filter out news that are not good news, this would be plain denial. For a same news, an article can be written in a positive and analytical way, or trying to incite hate or bad feelings. This is the later I want to filter, and sentiment analysis is probably the perfect tool for that. I would love to know how you built your training dataset (how good and bad labels were decided), because that's ultimately the choice that shapes the whole decision process. Maybe this should be a standard kind of page for products offering ML based filtering. Also, thanks a lot for providing an "all stories" tab, additionally to "good stories" and "bad stories", this is something automatic curated content misses too often. I really love the "stories to read" mode of google now, which provides me stories based on my interests, that's basically the first thing I check every morning. But I always wonder, when I read news from there : "is this a thing for the whole world or just for me?". We need referential, the possibility to see the whole picture and to switch easily between "content for me" and "content for the world" to take advantage of the bubble without being harmed by it.
xiamx 9y ago
Curious to know which algorithm and the sourcing of corpus you chose to train your system on. On a similar note, here a curation of great sentiment analysis methods and implementations: https://github.com/xiamx/awesome-sentiment-analysis https://github.com/xiamx/awesome-sentiment-analysis
- Yeroniomus 9y ago
  Thanks a lot for the link. I've used the technology called Paragraph Vectors https://cs.stanford.edu/~quocle/paragraph_vector.pdf https://cs.stanford.edu/~quocle/paragraph_vector.pdf for sentiment features extraction. Training collections were created in a semi-automatic mode and included news title+short description gathered from popular RSS feeds.
  - minimaxir 9y ago
    Sentence vectors encode the data, but how do you determine if a story is positive or negative?
    - Yeroniomus 9y ago
      After collection of possible positive/negative features with weights I used logistic regression classifier with some modifications (e.g. position algorithm) to classify the article. It determines the article polarity based on features (words, phrases and etc.)
AlphaWeaver 9y ago
Seems like an interesting idea.
Animats 9y ago
If 3 of the 4 top "good news" stories mention Trump, as seen in the ad, there may be a problem.
- Yeroniomus 9y ago
  Yes, not very good screenshot for the landing page. But all of the predictions were made by AI :-)
  - jwilliams 9y ago
    I think that's something really important to consider -- related the tailoring/personalization question in this thread too. I looked at the page and every article (picked by AI) was quite negative in the sense that I believe it. They were articles about geopolitical grandstanding, extrajudicial executions of drug dealers, etc. Even if you took the pro-con Trump angle out (if possible), and put in <your favorite politician> I'd still not consider them positive topics. My immediate reaction was this was really incongruent. I imagine it'll be for many others too.
- fapjacks 9y ago
  I was going to post here that it may be "good news" if you voted for him, but this brings up an interesting point: I know people that even voted for him that no longer would consider that kind of thing "good news". Makes you wonder how long it would take for the app to figure out that you no longer consider something "good news". Sort of like how I had a friend stay with me for about a month, and he used by Netflix profile, and rated a bunch of stuff (which perhaps is the rudest thing a houseguest could do, I think). I'm still recovering proper recommendations.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Well, he won the election. So news about Trump is probably seen as "good" by a lot of people.
owlmirror 9y ago
Does the system learn about an users preference and classify news tailored to your personal profile, or does it simply do a general prediction?
- Yeroniomus 9y ago
  Not now. It does a general prediction. Maybe I will add this feature in future releases.
pknight 9y ago
Concept is great! The screenshots don't inspire a sense of it working effectively though. I don't think raw sentiment analysis is enough. 'Good' news to me has one or more of the following qualities: - It's actionable - It's informative in a pragmatic sense - It invokes a positive emotion, such as curiosity, wonder, appreciation, hope, fascination, delight, laughter - It doesn't aimlessly invoke apathy/fear/anger/disgust/disappointment/hopelessness - It has substance and is more than a mere report or thin and reflexive reaction - It isn't tailored to reinforce a specific political agenda - It's within a domain of interest - It makes be better equipped to deal with the world That rules out almost all news articles and virtually all of the examples in the screenshots. I don't think that kind of selecting can be done purely with a sentiment analysis.
- vollmond 9y ago
  The political agenda one is important. "Good" news to me in some areas of society are very much not good news to some other people (say, an abortion-related court case being decided).
coolgeek 9y ago
So, the software equivalent of soma?
- rs86 9y ago
  Yes, I am surprised by the lack of criticism by the community. Only see what is happy and awesome?
wbronchart 9y ago
> BUILT YOUR OWN NEWS BLOCK I think you mean Build
hentrep 9y ago
Love the concept! I'd be interested when/if this launches on iOS. Perhaps add an email capture to the landing page?
sidep 9y ago
Is not owning the copyright to the news displayed an issue? If so, how do you plan to deal with it?
- wonderous 9y ago
  If you look at this slide you can see it showing the content via the website that posted the content: http://www.sentinewsmob.ml/img/slide_5.png http://www.sentinewsmob.ml/img/slide_5.png So, no, this is not an issue, no different than Google, HN, etc. linking to a story.
nebabyte 9y ago
> Duterte: Trump says Phillipines tackling drug problem 'the right way' ...hahahaha
tbihl 9y ago
Is there any reason you didn't include either the Atlantic or the National Review? For US based news, they seem pretty hard to beat if you can bear to give reporters a few hours to digest stories and provide meaningful insight.
MichaelMoser123 9y ago
Great idea, I wonder of they took some inspiration from the sunglasses of Zaphod Beeblebrox. http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Joo_Janta_200_Super-Chromatic_Peril_Sensitive_Sunglasses http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Joo_Janta_200_Super-Chroma...
- MichaelMoser123 9y ago
  I wonder if the user will like it , some authors will use terms that are all good for items considered bad by the customers - depending on the bias of the author. Sentiment analysis will fail if an opposite political bias is considered.
crdoconnor 9y ago
Ironically, Perez winning the DNC chair was awful news.
aphextron 9y ago
I'm far less interested in "positive" news than in news that is relevant to me. So much of online news has become clickbait political nonsense. I'd really like a news reader that is human curated to filter out the fake nonsense that makes it into Google News, while using ML to pick out the stories that matter to me from publishers I trust.
- NumberCruncher 9y ago
  Aaron Swartz made a good point about the relevance of news [1]. [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
jansho 9y ago
Sorry I may have missed something. So how is "sentiment analysis" done? I assume that this will be personalised, rather than the binary good/bad news classification? Congratulations though, I think the concept itself is good :) But, I think it may work better if it focuses solely on the "uplifting" type of good news. (As others have pointed out, a piece of news could be good for some people, bad to others.) Most of us get upsetting news everyday, so imagine if your app is the go-to place to rinse out all that $h!++y aftertaste with positive, inspiring stories :) Edit: word
ganfortran 9y ago
Should name it Safe Space News /s
SyneRyder 9y ago
I thought this was interesting the first time I saw it... but you've submitted this to Show HN 13 times now, including multiple domains that redirect to the same site, and you're also using multiple HN accounts to keep resubmitting it. Don't you think that's a bit much? https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Yeroniomus https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Yeroniomus https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sentinewsteam https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sentinewsteam https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hacakton https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hacakton https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinewsmob.ml https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinewsmob.ml https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinews.ml https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinews.ml https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=intellexer.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=intellexer.com
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

84 points by Yeroniomus 9y ago

Haven't there been several of these posted to Hacker News already? All of which look almost identical. EDIT: Ah, apparently they're all links to this page.

Yeroniomus 9y ago

Hello, Hacker News users! It's my first Android app and first experience of Android development :-). SentiNews is based on sentiment analysis which helps to classify news as positive or negative. What do you think about general concept of the app? Will be waiting for your feedback.

aplummer 9y ago
Congratulation on shipping! Regardless of the feedback you've made it a lot further than most. Good luck!
- Yeroniomus 9y ago
  Thanks a lot for the suggestions and feedbacks to everyone. My nearest plans: small interface redesign, improvement of sentiment analysis algorithm, personalization of news feeds and the iOS launch. Keep on updates!
oelmekki 9y ago
Great job, congratulations! My first reaction was : "well, if it's sentiment analysis, it doesn't know anything about if the news is bad or good, only about the mood of writer". But I then realized this is actually even better. I don't want to filter out news that are not good news, this would be plain denial. For a same news, an article can be written in a positive and analytical way, or trying to incite hate or bad feelings. This is the later I want to filter, and sentiment analysis is probably the perfect tool for that. I would love to know how you built your training dataset (how good and bad labels were decided), because that's ultimately the choice that shapes the whole decision process. Maybe this should be a standard kind of page for products offering ML based filtering. Also, thanks a lot for providing an "all stories" tab, additionally to "good stories" and "bad stories", this is something automatic curated content misses too often. I really love the "stories to read" mode of google now, which provides me stories based on my interests, that's basically the first thing I check every morning. But I always wonder, when I read news from there : "is this a thing for the whole world or just for me?". We need referential, the possibility to see the whole picture and to switch easily between "content for me" and "content for the world" to take advantage of the bubble without being harmed by it.

xiamx 9y ago

Curious to know which algorithm and the sourcing of corpus you chose to train your system on. On a similar note, here a curation of great sentiment analysis methods and implementations: https://github.com/xiamx/awesome-sentiment-analysis https://github.com/xiamx/awesome-sentiment-analysis

Yeroniomus 9y ago
Thanks a lot for the link. I've used the technology called Paragraph Vectors https://cs.stanford.edu/~quocle/paragraph_vector.pdf https://cs.stanford.edu/~quocle/paragraph_vector.pdf for sentiment features extraction. Training collections were created in a semi-automatic mode and included news title+short description gathered from popular RSS feeds.
- minimaxir 9y ago
  Sentence vectors encode the data, but how do you determine if a story is positive or negative?
  - Yeroniomus 9y ago
    After collection of possible positive/negative features with weights I used logistic regression classifier with some modifications (e.g. position algorithm) to classify the article. It determines the article polarity based on features (words, phrases and etc.)

AlphaWeaver 9y ago

Seems like an interesting idea.

Animats 9y ago

If 3 of the 4 top "good news" stories mention Trump, as seen in the ad, there may be a problem.

Yeroniomus 9y ago
Yes, not very good screenshot for the landing page. But all of the predictions were made by AI :-)
- jwilliams 9y ago
  I think that's something really important to consider -- related the tailoring/personalization question in this thread too. I looked at the page and every article (picked by AI) was quite negative in the sense that I believe it. They were articles about geopolitical grandstanding, extrajudicial executions of drug dealers, etc. Even if you took the pro-con Trump angle out (if possible), and put in <your favorite politician> I'd still not consider them positive topics. My immediate reaction was this was really incongruent. I imagine it'll be for many others too.
fapjacks 9y ago
I was going to post here that it may be "good news" if you voted for him, but this brings up an interesting point: I know people that even voted for him that no longer would consider that kind of thing "good news". Makes you wonder how long it would take for the app to figure out that you no longer consider something "good news". Sort of like how I had a friend stay with me for about a month, and he used by Netflix profile, and rated a bunch of stuff (which perhaps is the rudest thing a houseguest could do, I think). I'm still recovering proper recommendations.
ams6110 9y ago
Well, he won the election. So news about Trump is probably seen as "good" by a lot of people.

owlmirror 9y ago

Does the system learn about an users preference and classify news tailored to your personal profile, or does it simply do a general prediction?

Yeroniomus 9y ago
Not now. It does a general prediction. Maybe I will add this feature in future releases.

pknight 9y ago

Concept is great! The screenshots don't inspire a sense of it working effectively though. I don't think raw sentiment analysis is enough. 'Good' news to me has one or more of the following qualities: - It's actionable - It's informative in a pragmatic sense - It invokes a positive emotion, such as curiosity, wonder, appreciation, hope, fascination, delight, laughter - It doesn't aimlessly invoke apathy/fear/anger/disgust/disappointment/hopelessness - It has substance and is more than a mere report or thin and reflexive reaction - It isn't tailored to reinforce a specific political agenda - It's within a domain of interest - It makes be better equipped to deal with the world That rules out almost all news articles and virtually all of the examples in the screenshots. I don't think that kind of selecting can be done purely with a sentiment analysis.

vollmond 9y ago
The political agenda one is important. "Good" news to me in some areas of society are very much not good news to some other people (say, an abortion-related court case being decided).

coolgeek 9y ago

So, the software equivalent of soma?

rs86 9y ago
Yes, I am surprised by the lack of criticism by the community. Only see what is happy and awesome?

wbronchart 9y ago

> BUILT YOUR OWN NEWS BLOCK I think you mean Build

hentrep 9y ago

Love the concept! I'd be interested when/if this launches on iOS. Perhaps add an email capture to the landing page?

sidep 9y ago

Is not owning the copyright to the news displayed an issue? If so, how do you plan to deal with it?

wonderous 9y ago
If you look at this slide you can see it showing the content via the website that posted the content: http://www.sentinewsmob.ml/img/slide_5.png http://www.sentinewsmob.ml/img/slide_5.png So, no, this is not an issue, no different than Google, HN, etc. linking to a story.

nebabyte 9y ago

> Duterte: Trump says Phillipines tackling drug problem 'the right way' ...hahahaha

tbihl 9y ago

Is there any reason you didn't include either the Atlantic or the National Review? For US based news, they seem pretty hard to beat if you can bear to give reporters a few hours to digest stories and provide meaningful insight.

MichaelMoser123 9y ago

Great idea, I wonder of they took some inspiration from the sunglasses of Zaphod Beeblebrox. http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Joo_Janta_200_Super-Chromatic_Peril_Sensitive_Sunglasses http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Joo_Janta_200_Super-Chroma...

MichaelMoser123 9y ago
I wonder if the user will like it , some authors will use terms that are all good for items considered bad by the customers - depending on the bias of the author. Sentiment analysis will fail if an opposite political bias is considered.

crdoconnor 9y ago

Ironically, Perez winning the DNC chair was awful news.

aphextron 9y ago

I'm far less interested in "positive" news than in news that is relevant to me. So much of online news has become clickbait political nonsense. I'd really like a news reader that is human curated to filter out the fake nonsense that makes it into Google News, while using ML to pick out the stories that matter to me from publishers I trust.

NumberCruncher 9y ago
Aaron Swartz made a good point about the relevance of news [1]. [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

jansho 9y ago

Sorry I may have missed something. So how is "sentiment analysis" done? I assume that this will be personalised, rather than the binary good/bad news classification? Congratulations though, I think the concept itself is good :) But, I think it may work better if it focuses solely on the "uplifting" type of good news. (As others have pointed out, a piece of news could be good for some people, bad to others.) Most of us get upsetting news everyday, so imagine if your app is the go-to place to rinse out all that $h!++y aftertaste with positive, inspiring stories :) Edit: word

ganfortran 9y ago

Should name it Safe Space News /s

SyneRyder 9y ago

I thought this was interesting the first time I saw it... but you've submitted this to Show HN 13 times now, including multiple domains that redirect to the same site, and you're also using multiple HN accounts to keep resubmitting it. Don't you think that's a bit much? https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Yeroniomus https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Yeroniomus https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sentinewsteam https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sentinewsteam https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hacakton https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hacakton https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinewsmob.ml https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinewsmob.ml https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinews.ml https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sentinews.ml https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=intellexer.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=intellexer.com

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]