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I want to know if a twit is positive or negative. For example:

thesis: jonas brothers eat charcoal "Jonas Brothers are going to eat charcoal" >>> Positive

"Jonas Brothers have nothing to do with charcoal" >>> Negative

thesis: melmac is destroyed "Melmac is dead" >>> positive

"Alf is living with his friends in melmac" >>> negative

I want to know if there's some kind of algorithm to do this, on a generic, non languaje specific basis.

What's the easiest approach? Thanks in advance.

AlfredoVR
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  • You have two problems: "Generic natural language understanding", and difficult reasoning problems, e.g., "Here's some code: xxx yyyy ... zzzz". "Halts?" I don't think you can do this "generically". You need to put some limitations on what you are willing to reason about. – Ira Baxter May 14 '11 at 07:32
  • There's nothing generic in human language, and the limitations are these: 1- just 140 character statements. 2- negative or positive result. 3- two or trhee words are given as the "fact" Do you think this conditions suffice? – AlfredoVR May 14 '11 at 07:54
  • No. "Wolfram's prize winning minimal Turing machine... Halts"? meets all of your criteria. You still can't answer the question. – Ira Baxter May 14 '11 at 08:22
  • What's the fact you are testing in that sentence? – AlfredoVR May 14 '11 at 09:15
  • The halting problem is a fundamental limit on what you can compute. Check these two links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem and http://www.wolframscience.com/prizes/tm23/ – Ira Baxter May 14 '11 at 09:51
  • I wasn't aware of the halt problem, just thougth it was an example. The 2,3 turing machine is a nice reading. I will re-ask a better question in cstheroy :) – AlfredoVR May 15 '11 at 03:25

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I think I good approach would be to keep a dictionary of negation statements : don't, isn't, nothing, etc. Find those keywords in a statement. You would also have to account for double negatives through a counting system. For instance " I haven't not given an answer", is positive but contains negative words.

xdevient
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  • I was thinking something like that, counting keywords and synonims, but is there a smarter approach? – AlfredoVR May 14 '11 at 06:43
  • You are also assuming here that the statement given is actually related to your thesis. Thesis: "Ham tastes good". Statement: "I don't like the color blue." This fits the problem description but would be missed by a too simple algorithm. – Orka May 14 '11 at 14:51
  • To clarify this, i will search certain string, for example, "#HAMTASTESGOOD" a hashtag in twitter, or just "HAM", then run the test. – AlfredoVR May 14 '11 at 18:35
  • Orka has a point. However finding a statement that exactly matches a thesis without specified parameters could be extremely difficult. I could see a lot of difficulties in generic statements and the use of pronouns. Thesis : "Ham is good" Statement : "It was eating while walking through the park one day..." You could recognize that "eating" correlates with "ham", but you would have to know that ham is the subject and that ham can not walk. A whole other project in it's self. Something to alleviate this is to require input to restate the subject. – xdevient May 14 '11 at 22:09