Research Project: Using Twitter to Tap the World’s Emotions (Online Demo Available)

From BRW (Australia):

Researchers from CSIRO’s (Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) Australia) Digital Productivity and Services Flagship are working with the Black Dog Institute to use Twitter data to gather insights into the state of mental health around the world.
A CSIRO application, called WeFeel, uses Amazon Web Services’ big data Kinesis technology to access 10 per cent of the world’s tweets in just four seconds and create a sentiment analysis based on the words in the tweets.
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Postdoctoral research fellow at CSIRO, David Milne, says the research is still “pretty exploratory”.
While Twitter users are not necessarily representative of the Australian population (only 15 per cent of internet users in this country use Twitter, compared with 90 per cent on Facebook, according to Sensis data), Milne says adjustments could be made to the data collection to correct skewing.

Read the Complete Article
Demo and Additional Resources
Direct to WeFeel Demo Website
WeFeel Project Website
From a CSIRO Announcement:

“We Feel looks for up to 600 specific words in a stream of around 27 million tweets per day and maps them to a hierarchy of emotions which includes love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear,” Research Leader in language and social computing at CSIRO’s Digital Productivity and Services Flagship Dr Cecile Paris said.

See Also: Tweets map the world’s emotional response in real-time (via New Scientist)
560 words.

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