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.
To do this, Morency and his colleagues combed through hundreds of YouTube videos featuring full-on diatribes, such as those from 20-something misanthrope Kingsley trashing everything from small birds to aggressive drivers. A proof-of-concept data set of about 50 videos was then fed into a computer program Morency developed that overlays graphics on the speaker to hone in on language, speech patterns, and facial expressions to determine the type of opinion being shared.
This small sample trumps studying text alone (emoticons notwithstanding), says Morency, because it offers clues into the less obvious nuances of communication. Beyond obvious squeals of delight, Morency finds that people look at the camera more when sharing a positive view and their voices ...
[Source: Fast Company]
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