[Corpora-List] EmoText - Software for opinion mining and lexical affect sensing

[Graham White]

I think this is a very good point, especially since a lot of this 
software can be quite harmful if it's oversold. I'm thinking 
particularly of social network analysis tools, and claims that they can
"detect terrorist networks" or such like. Of course, no serious 
researcher would make exaggerated claims like that, but they do get
made (and the reasons for the making of such claims lie somewhere in the 
complex social network of researchers, software manufacturers, and
politicians). And the results of such overselling can be quite damaging.

We all want, of course, to be able to say "well, here is this software, 
and it works a bit, so give it a try but be careful", and I think in the 
academic community we can get away with it (and it can also be a very 
useful thing to do). But it's very difficult to get a message like that 
across in the public domain, and there are all sorts of reasons
(such as public perception of uncertainty) why it's difficult to get 
across.

Graham

-----------------------------

Graham White
Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Queen Mary University of London

On 17/12/11 12:41, Yannick Versley wrote:
>     The system relies on scientific findings in my phd thesis; it works
>     and the results are not that bad. They could be better and I also
>     describe in the thesis how they can be improved. It's up to you, you
>     can ignore them and loose time.
>
> It's a common fallacy that we in computational linguistics (maybe in all
> applicable science in general)
> tend towards, that if we made scientific progress, what we made must
> obviously be good for something.
>
> This is even more valid for tasks that do have a strong
> application-oriented motivation, such as
> sentiment analysis, and as a researcher you have a responsability
> towards society not to live
> in too bad a delusion about the usability of "exciting" work.
> (Most researchers cultivate a bit of reality distortion to be able to
> get their work publish, but let's
> not think that having this kind of delusion is good for society).
>
> Turning scientific research into a real improvement (for your customers,
> or for society in general)
> is a long way from the actual research, and I do think it's laudable to
> build demonstrators that
> allow people to inspect the current state of the art, but the remaining
> (larger) part of the long way
> means that you have to step outside the box of academic evaluation and
> assess the whole
> context of usage (see, e.g., the "good uses for bad MT" paper that I
> can't seem to find).
>
> -Yannick
>
>
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