3 ms·

Ask HN: Review ContextSense - deduces context and sentiment for any URL/text

20 points by paraschopra 17y ago

paraschopra 17y ago
Hey guys, my startup (Wingify) has exposed an API for determining sentiment and context from any URL or piece of text. I'll be glad if you could review it. ContextSense was made to demonstrate our contextual targeting capabilities -- and sentiment aspect was added to avoid traditional blunders of displaying ads on pages/news on catastrophies. Best to try ContextSense with text heavy URLs. Also try it with news items (both positive and negative). I will be happy to provide API access in case any of you is interested in trying it out.
- elcron 17y ago
  Cool! I tried something like this, it classified blog posts into 100 different moods... it had ~8% accuracy (It also classified as positive or negative, but I don't remember the accuracy, I'll have to dig it up at some point...). Good luck with it.
  - paraschopra 17y ago
    Do you remember what was it? I will be really curious to have a look. Thanks.
    - elcron 17y ago
      It was accurate around 56% of the time classifying as positive, negative, or neutral. I used a naive Bayesian classifier and guessed the highest rather than showing the percent positive.
DanielStraight 17y ago
Can't get it to work. Won't load.
- paraschopra 17y ago
  Which browser? Platform? And which URL?
  - DanielStraight 17y ago
    Firefox 3.5.3 on WinXP 64 with the URL that comes up when you load the site. The status spinners just keep spinning forever.
    - paraschopra 17y ago
      Thanks for the info. Strangely, with exactly same configuration (except WinXP 32 -- which shouldn't make any difference), this is working for me.
    - thorax 17y ago
      What Firefox extensions? Works great here on XP 64.
      - DanielStraight 17y ago
        None that should interfere... Firebug, Site Launcher, Colorzilla. I typically have cookies disable, but I turned them on and it made no difference.
byoung2 17y ago
I searched for http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/slavery/ http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/slaver... Few human practices have provoked such deep and widespread outrage as the practice of one human being enslaving another. So why has slavery survived for thousands of years? How did it become so important to civilization? Explore the ways that slavery has been woven into the fabric of societies in America and around the world. Sentiment: Highly Positive (0.77) Seems off in cases where the tone of the text is neutral but the subject matter is negative.
mishmax 17y ago
Would be nice if it didn't need http in front of a url.
yannis 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust Slightly Negative (0.33) Extract From the same link (text only as shown below) Highly Positive 0.81! >The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was the euphemistic phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust".[16] For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term Völkermord ("genocide"), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah. NLP is H A R D, I know and defining a range value for sentiment even harder.
- paraschopra 17y ago
  Yup, I agree -- though more data provides more oppurtunities to make a better guess.
frig 17y ago
I put this in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C*-algebra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C*-algebra The results are better than I would've guessed, but not really so great (this article is pretty degenerate I think, versus more "human-interest" type stories). One thing I'm curious out: the list of topics is here: People (7.88) Algebra (4.47) Research Groups (3.41) Software (2.42) Math (2.03) Functional Analysis (1.53) Journals (1.01) Science (0.71) Publications (0.64) Logic and Foundations (0.6) ...does looking at the content give you any sense for why "People" comes in first?
- paraschopra 17y ago
  Yes,the false positive rate is a not the least and we are working on decreasing it!
  - frig 17y ago
    I guess what I'm asking is: is "People" just a default answer?
    - paraschopra 17y ago
      No, People is not a default answer. It is due to underlying taxonomy data. Working on refining the database.
rwolf 17y ago
The comments so far refer to the "sentiment deducer" aspect of the service. They've brought up some examples of how it's not working right now, but they missed an important question: what in the world is "positive sentiment" abstracted from context, and why would I want to know if a site had it? An issue we haven't brought up is tags. Current tags for HN: "ago, points, comments, com, hours, hour, hacker, discuss, minutes, tornado." I see some good ones, but it's quite noisy (and it seems to have grabbed the tornado story as a main topic--scraping the title?). This feature seems most useful to me, and most easy to improve.
- paraschopra 17y ago
  No, not just a title but the whole website. The algo currently works on TF-IDF of the tags, and HN is full of points, ago, hours, etc. repeated all over it. This increases the TF. We would be putting an upper limit on it though.
  - rwolf 17y ago
    I didn't mean the title tag--I meant the first story title (the SEO kids talk about google fixating on the first h1 tag of a site, I though it might be a similar idea). I have no idea what this upper limit change would do, but good luck.
quizbiz 17y ago
Have it recommend changes. Tell us what we can do to improve.
onewland 17y ago
I think positive/negative is too shallow. I actually do enjoy this, but I think you need to rate sentiments on other vectors, so if I rate http://teddziuba.com/ http://teddziuba.com/ I get something like: Anger: 25 Smugness: 50 Vulgarity: 15 Boredom: 5 etc. I'm not even sure that's a good example or if it's clear, I just think positive/negative is an oversimplification of the sentiment of most sites.
- wlievens 17y ago
  Whatever you do, Ted Dzubia will break any scale.
erikwiffin 17y ago
Reading the other comments, it looks like your biggest problems are false positives. It might not be a bad idea to put together some kind of feedback mechanism - in the event that I disagree with the sentiment/tags/categories that I could provide better ones and you could eventually use that data to refine your algorithm. That being said, this looks really cool and full of potential, now I just need a reason to be auto-generating that kind of meta data.

20 points by paraschopra 17y ago

Hey guys, my startup (Wingify) has exposed an API for determining sentiment and context from any URL or piece of text. I'll be glad if you could review it. ContextSense was made to demonstrate our contextual targeting capabilities -- and sentiment aspect was added to avoid traditional blunders of displaying ads on pages/news on catastrophies. Best to try ContextSense with text heavy URLs. Also try it with news items (both positive and negative). I will be happy to provide API access in case any of you is interested in trying it out.

elcron 17y ago
Cool! I tried something like this, it classified blog posts into 100 different moods... it had ~8% accuracy (It also classified as positive or negative, but I don't remember the accuracy, I'll have to dig it up at some point...). Good luck with it.
- paraschopra 17y ago
  Do you remember what was it? I will be really curious to have a look. Thanks.
  - elcron 17y ago
    It was accurate around 56% of the time classifying as positive, negative, or neutral. I used a naive Bayesian classifier and guessed the highest rather than showing the percent positive.

DanielStraight 17y ago

Can't get it to work. Won't load.

paraschopra 17y ago
Which browser? Platform? And which URL?
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  Firefox 3.5.3 on WinXP 64 with the URL that comes up when you load the site. The status spinners just keep spinning forever.
  - paraschopra 17y ago
    Thanks for the info. Strangely, with exactly same configuration (except WinXP 32 -- which shouldn't make any difference), this is working for me.
  - thorax 17y ago
    What Firefox extensions? Works great here on XP 64.
    - DanielStraight 17y ago
      None that should interfere... Firebug, Site Launcher, Colorzilla. I typically have cookies disable, but I turned them on and it made no difference.

byoung2 17y ago

I searched for http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/slavery/ http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/slaver... Few human practices have provoked such deep and widespread outrage as the practice of one human being enslaving another. So why has slavery survived for thousands of years? How did it become so important to civilization? Explore the ways that slavery has been woven into the fabric of societies in America and around the world. Sentiment: Highly Positive (0.77) Seems off in cases where the tone of the text is neutral but the subject matter is negative.

mishmax 17y ago

Would be nice if it didn't need http in front of a url.

yannis 17y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust Slightly Negative (0.33) Extract From the same link (text only as shown below) Highly Positive 0.81! >The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was the euphemistic phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust".[16] For a time after World War II, German historians also used the term Völkermord ("genocide"), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah. NLP is H A R D, I know and defining a range value for sentiment even harder.

paraschopra 17y ago
Yup, I agree -- though more data provides more oppurtunities to make a better guess.

frig 17y ago

I put this in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C*-algebra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C*-algebra The results are better than I would've guessed, but not really so great (this article is pretty degenerate I think, versus more "human-interest" type stories). One thing I'm curious out: the list of topics is here: People (7.88) Algebra (4.47) Research Groups (3.41) Software (2.42) Math (2.03) Functional Analysis (1.53) Journals (1.01) Science (0.71) Publications (0.64) Logic and Foundations (0.6) ...does looking at the content give you any sense for why "People" comes in first?

paraschopra 17y ago
Yes,the false positive rate is a not the least and we are working on decreasing it!
- frig 17y ago
  I guess what I'm asking is: is "People" just a default answer?
  - paraschopra 17y ago
    No, People is not a default answer. It is due to underlying taxonomy data. Working on refining the database.

rwolf 17y ago

The comments so far refer to the "sentiment deducer" aspect of the service. They've brought up some examples of how it's not working right now, but they missed an important question: what in the world is "positive sentiment" abstracted from context, and why would I want to know if a site had it? An issue we haven't brought up is tags. Current tags for HN: "ago, points, comments, com, hours, hour, hacker, discuss, minutes, tornado." I see some good ones, but it's quite noisy (and it seems to have grabbed the tornado story as a main topic--scraping the title?). This feature seems most useful to me, and most easy to improve.

paraschopra 17y ago
No, not just a title but the whole website. The algo currently works on TF-IDF of the tags, and HN is full of points, ago, hours, etc. repeated all over it. This increases the TF. We would be putting an upper limit on it though.
- rwolf 17y ago
  I didn't mean the title tag--I meant the first story title (the SEO kids talk about google fixating on the first h1 tag of a site, I though it might be a similar idea). I have no idea what this upper limit change would do, but good luck.

quizbiz 17y ago

Have it recommend changes. Tell us what we can do to improve.

onewland 17y ago

I think positive/negative is too shallow. I actually do enjoy this, but I think you need to rate sentiments on other vectors, so if I rate http://teddziuba.com/ http://teddziuba.com/ I get something like: Anger: 25 Smugness: 50 Vulgarity: 15 Boredom: 5 etc. I'm not even sure that's a good example or if it's clear, I just think positive/negative is an oversimplification of the sentiment of most sites.

wlievens 17y ago
Whatever you do, Ted Dzubia will break any scale.

erikwiffin 17y ago

Reading the other comments, it looks like your biggest problems are false positives. It might not be a bad idea to put together some kind of feedback mechanism - in the event that I disagree with the sentiment/tags/categories that I could provide better ones and you could eventually use that data to refine your algorithm. That being said, this looks really cool and full of potential, now I just need a reason to be auto-generating that kind of meta data.