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created 9 months ago | Tagged: |
Pocas
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When Louis-Philippe Morency was teaching his first course in analyzing human behavior at University of Southern California, he was scrounging to find good videos of people talking to each other and expressing their opinions. Then he had a lightbulb moment: YouTube. Suddenly “millions of examples” of individuals opining on topics ranging from beauty creams to baseball were available to analyze--for free. Forget stilted focus-group sessions. “What is really amazing is all these people are talking straight to the camera with limited background noise and describing how they feel and what they like,” he explains.
For Morency, whose work as a scientist at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) focuses on teaching computers to identify and understand the ways people convey emotion, YouTube’s treasure trove represented more than a way to serve up data sets to his students. It has the potential to advance the growing industry of opinion mining beyond the hunt for insight amidst text-only Amazon product reviews and Facebook status updates. “We are taking this field one step further by focusing on online videos, which provide verbal and non-verbal communication clues beyond just words,” says Morency.
