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What are they thinking?

IDS Center student Swapna Somasundaran developing automated coding of blogs and discussion boards to discern public opinion

(Oct. 2, 2007)

The Internet has joined the newspaper opinions page and the water cooler as a hot spot for the spouting of public opinion. DHS student Swapna Somasundaran has her finger on this pulse, able to extract concrete opinions and feelings from the plethora of bulletin boards, discussion forums and blogs dominating the online world.

A Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Pittsburgh, Somasundaran studies the expression of opinion and feelings for question answering (QA). Answers to questions like, “Are you worried about climate change?” versus, “What would be the effect of reporting Iran to the Security Council?” show the difference in simply expressing a mood over arguing an opinion.

It is within the varied answers to these different question types that Somasundaran is creating new ways to mine public mood and opinions. While human effort could code and analyze answers, her goal is to automate the process to make it more efficient.

Such automation is not easy when one considers the variety of ways in which ideas are expressed – slang, choppy sentence segments, “buzz words” and poor grammar are just a few examples.

In response, Somasundaran has trained humans to extract opinions and sentiments from text, and she is teaching computers to do the same. Through her feeding of opinion information into computer-based recognition systems, machines are also able to answer opinion questions.

Tapping public mood on a subject, helping moderators to more effectively run meetings by discerning and grouping opinions, and enabling conference or QA summarizers to specifically report on opinions that influence a decision are just a few of the applications that are possible through this research.

Graduating in 2009, Somasundaran is a member of the Center for the Extraction and Summarization of Events and Opinions in Text (CERATOPS), a part of the DHS Institute for Discrete Sciences (IDS-UACS) Center of Excellence that conducts research on advanced methods for information analysis and the development of computational technologies to protect the Nation.