Psyching Out the Emotions in Those Tweets, New Software Tells All
We have software that can diagnose whether we broke a bone, where our kids are every minute, even perform surgery through a robot. But be careful with your tweets. Now there's software that can tell how you were feeling when you, well, tweeted. Computer scientists from the University of Utah’s College of Engineering have developed what they call “sentiment analysis” software that can automatically determine how someone feels based on what they write or say. To test out the accuracy of this software’s machine-learning model, the team used it to analyze the individual sentiments of more than 1.6 million (and counting) geo-tagged tweets about the U.S. presidential election over the last five months. A database of these tweets is then examined to determine whether states and their counties are leaning toward the Republicans or Democrats. “With sentiment analysis, it will try to predict the emotions behind every human being when he or she is talking or writin...