Announcing: TweetSentiments.com API for Sentiment Analysis | Hacker News Reader

Announcing: TweetSentiments.com API for Sentiment Analysis

intridea.com

17 pointsrenaebair14 comments

Speaking as someone who's been working on NLP, sentiment and semantic analysis for two years now, I've come to the conclusion that sentiment as a product is useless. There's no actionable conclusion from sentiment alone. You need to dig deeper, apply part of speech tagging, and determine the underlying intent.

We, too, use SVMs to determine sentiment (in fact, we built a web-based API to create, train and deploy your own SVMs) but if you're goal is to make money, then you need more than just "this tweet is positive/negative/neutral".

Marketing folks need to sell an actionable strategy. For example, "People are speaking positively about your product because they love the packaging" or "People are speaking negatively about BlackBerry because they can't figure out how to configure their work email accounts". Both of these give much more insight than just polarity.

You are absolutely right, and some of the things you mentioned are in our roadmap

Cool. Maybe you'd like to talk about this stuff, we might be able to work together? martin [at] repustate [dot] com

Quick suggestion about the API endpoints, versioning is really important as it allows you to add/remove/update features without breaking any application using your API. You should add it before anyone starts building on top of your API.

Versioning should really be done with an "Accepts" HTTP header as opposed to changing a resource's URL.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1566460

In a perfect world, I’d agree with you. The author of the article you linked to provides a good answer to this problem:

    If your audience is architecturally minded and aware of REST,
    you should version data representations in the MIME
    types your application accepts.

    If your clients view the URL as the most important facet,
    make the URL the center of your versioning efforts.
    Folks who are familiar with versioning with WS-* Web
    services tend to be more comfortable with changing the
    URL when versions change.

Both approaches should work, putting version in the url seemed to be more widely used, we will take both in to consideration, thanks for the suggestions

Have you evaluated your model on the standard evaluation sets, and if so, how does it compare to current state of the art?

It should be on par with the current state of the art, and we are working on improving it.

How does this stack up against something like AlchemyAPI (http://www.alchemyapi.com/) which seem to roll in a lot more than simple sentiment analysis in a far more flexible product?

At the present, we tend to be more focused on Twitter, and our models built with tweets. Down the road, we will have a more flexible and comprehensive offering.

interesting, congratulation for your release. I do think open-uri reads better than net/http in examples though :)

Agreed, we can worked that in the future and we are working on a gem to make things easier.

Nice. Wonder whether Twitter Analytics will have something like this?

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