Odysseus

There are many websites, weblogs and articles on the Internet that express opinions on a variety of topics, and the ability to automatically mine these resources can allow us to access a wealth of information and opinions. In particular, web search can be combined with `sentiment analysis' technologies to allow us to find out what people are thinking about a range of topics issues. Sentiment analysis involves determining the attitude or opinion of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic. Typically it involves determining opinion polarity towards a given topic, ie. determining whether the authors opinion towards a topic is positive or negative.

In CLARITY, we are involved in an on-going project that is developing a suite of tools for sentiment analysis of blogs, web pages and other online text documents. This studentship will involve using these tools to crawl online documents, including texts on the topic of sensing the environment, and automatically determine the sentiment contained in these documents. For these documents we will extract publication dates and (possibly) geo-location information relating to the geographical focus of the document. The outcome of the project will be a search engine that, in response to a query, in addition to returning relevant documents, will also determine the positive or negative opinion of the document author towards the query topic. These sentiment analysis results will then be visualized on a video wall.

This this project will involve integrating the crawling, searching and sentiment analysis engine (provided by CLARITY) with a variety of sources of web-based text documents, including documents on environmental issues. The main challenge, however, is in visualizing the results of this data on a large video wall, with a focus on tracking opinions over time, and possibly incorporating geographic information. The use of a large video wall will allow the display of a large amount of information at once, and will allow the student to developed innovative ways to display, and interact with, online text information. Such an interactive wall is a novel platform with scope for much research.