Algorithms Be Damned: Predicting Summer Box Office Hits With Social Media

Coming from an AI background their approach gives me the itches a little bit. The title suggests that they have a system not using 'algorithms' but they score sentiment by hand. I assume they have a system of some kind to finally score the total bag of annotated sentiment data (=algorithm)...

What bugs me the most is that they try to overcome problems related to analyzing text for sentiment by throwing away all the technology that is currently available and using humans instead. Why not try to innovate on automated sentiment analyses and save lots of money and time?