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In twitter's search, the emoticons are not literal search terms but keywords that select for messages considered positive or negative more broadly. This might m
by shimon 17y ago
In twitter's search, the emoticons are not literal search terms but keywords that select for messages considered positive or negative more broadly. This might mean that :) translates to (cool OR awesome OR great ...) or it could be some fuzzier NLP thing. Who knows. Either way, it's a handy feature with a cute UI, totally un-understood by this writer. Considering the amount of merited curmudgeoning possible regarding twitter, this is pretty lame.
- gojomo 17y agoAfter the recent Mechanical Turk meetup, I tried being a Mechanical Turk worker to understand the process better. One of the work units I got was classifying the 'sentiments' of individual Tweets as 'positive', 'negative', 'both', 'none', or 'hard to tell'. It seemed that many of the tweets from several work units had to do with companies in the Web2.0-finance space, and others were about people traveling by air (missing flights, waiting in airports, etc.). I presumed I was helping to do one or more of: (1) help monitor certain direct brand/product mentions quantitatively on Twitter; (2) help do the same, indirectly, for people whose surrounding unseen tweets had linked them with specific airlines/airports; (3) help train a automated classifier to do the sentiment classifications, in general or for specific brand/experience domains. And perhaps, the classifying fed into this Twitter offering.
- falien 17y agoThat's what I was hoping it would be when I read it (and also thought the writer was shortsighted in dismissing it) but as far as I can tell it really does search emoticons. The only translation seems to be translating one type of happy emoticon to a bunch of other types.