Decision Support Systems For Business Intelligence
    by Vicki L. Sauter

 
 
Modeling Insights: Modeling Moods

Researchers at University of Vermont developed a website, www.wefeelfine.org, that mines through some 2.3 million blogs, looking for sentences beginning with "I feel" or "I am feeling."  They use personal online writing to determine the mood of people real time.  After mining the sentence, they use the standardized "psychological valence" of words (established by the Affective Norms for English Words) to give each sentence a happiness score.  The rating of the individual blog is not important; rather their goal is to measure the big picture of a town or other grouping of people.  They use their tool in an exploratory fashion to measure the feelings of the country as a whole.  Clearly such a tool could be used to mine for other words, such as those of a company’s product, to provide decision makers with consumer’s attitudes about the product.

 

   Page Owner: Professor Sauter (Vicki.Sauter AT umsl.edu)