“Browse through a few typical online comment threads, and the need for anger management quickly becomes clear, likely sending sane people scurrying off to more pleasant corners of the internet. Now scientists at Yahoo and their colleagues are devising ways to automatically flag inordinately irate commenters to keep them from ruining online conversations for others.
To help curb so-called trolls who spew disruptive comments as a kind of sport, researchers developed techniques for automatically identifying negative posts that are off-topic while staying away from relevant ones. But rather than banishing hostile jerks or deleting their comments, the system could someday help steer them into more productive discussions.
“We might want mechanisms where you can ask people to tone it down, or ‘take it outside’ to not disrupt others, or use humor to defuse situations,” said cognitive scientist Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo Research, who presented the work Sept. 30 at the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Atlanta.
Churchill and computer scientist Sara Owsley Sood of Pomona College analyzed 782,934 comments from 168,095 distinct threads from October 2009 articles on the news-story commenting site Yahoo! Buzz. To determine whether comments were on-topic or not, they first used the same techniques used by search engines to evaluate the relevance of a site to a query: The more words a comment contained that were also found in the story it was connected to, the more on-topic the comment was judged.
Next, the comments were judged as either angry, happy or sad. For example, “sucks” is linked with anger. The system learned to recognize emotions by reading LiveJournal posts, which bloggers can tag with moods such as “creative,” and analyzing which word combinations were linked most with certain moods.
The algorithms fared well at catching irrelevant comments and deciphering sentiments. The researchers agreed with the angry-sad-happy judgments on comments taken at random from their data 65 to 80 percent of the time. They hope to upgrade the system by having it learn from comments they manually classify by mood.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
In the future, the only people allowed to comment will be the ones that only ever say “Awesome!” about everything.
A spammer hammer they can call it.
So, soon you won’t be able to leave negative comments about anything? That SUCKS!!
But trolls have so much to teach us! They are the instigators who pray on your reactions, often well educated but pretending not to be just to see who they can get a reaction from, they teach restraint as replying to a troll is quickly learned to be inadvisable. They show us how easily anarchy can be created from discussion alone.
I love trolls, I love watching the reactions to a trolling statement and I love a healthy dose of uneducated negativity as it forces people to think about the positive in an educated way.
Seems to be some confusion or maybe I’m stupid and someone here is indeed trolling but I thought posting stupid posts was trolling and the angry posters were the trolls. The inane post is there in the hope that someone will dive all over it in a hurry to feel superior to the person that posted. I don’t think a lot of trolls are really that angry. Its just so easy to tell someone to fuck off via the internet because its totally faceless. Its the modern equivalent of putting dog shit through a strangers letter box or knock and run. Most of us played that at some point when we were kids only this is better. Its more like playing knock and run on the house across the road so you can watch them get annoyed. Its stupid, its childish and its good fun. Anyone want to come trolling with me?
I think everyone posting in this thread is socially inadequate, sexually dysfunctional and intellectually challenged.
How’s that Pete? :0)
this goddam negative post is irrelevant!
This post sucks, clearly.
Read books. Post less.
You all suck for saying this post sucks. This post is clearly superior to all of you. Combined,
Yeh fuck this post? It sucks donkey baws.
Fucking bollocks to this shit! Last!
captcha: suckmy balls
(P.S. I still love you Derren!)
For fuck sakes Phillis you could have been nicer about it.
It fucking s**ks!
I hope swear words aren’t filtered too.