On Thursday 5th December we welcomed Dr. Paul King from the University of Leicester to deliver the fourth lecture of our STEM lecture programme for this academic year.
Paul discussed the applications of analysing text using computer algorithms to gauge the reactions and feelings of people. The application of this is in market research of social media comments. By analysing specific word use, it is possible to determine if people are responding positively or negatively to a product or service.
To illustrate this concept, Paul demonstrated how you could analyse the feeling in well-known fiction, by analysing positive and negative words and assigning them scores. He demonstrated that this can accurately measure the feelings in a book as you read through the text. The results proved surprisingly accurate when the different stages of the story of each text were discussed.
The content presented was engaging and provided an insight into unfamiliar aspects of the use of social media data. Maybe this will make the students think about how the information they post online can be valuable to marketing companies.