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Post 2

NLP disambiguation

16-Oct-2008

This topic aroused my curiosity in my yesterday's attendance at the scientific research methodologies class, conducted by Dr. Mundet, when he suggested that the clear advantage of Barack Obama over John McCain for the Presidential Election 2008 was due, in part, to the special speech techniques that Obama uses. It's none of my business to discuss the political issues of the two candidates, but to analyse the scientific aspect of such fact, if there is some.

I am presently dealing with the emotion identification from text using semantic disambiguation [Garcia and Alias, 2008], so I first thought of NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques as tools to analyse such special speech techniques that Obama uses. I did some "googling" trying to relate Obama to NLP and in fact many links were found, but none matched my actual query. NLP referred to Neuro-linguistic Programming, an interpersonal communication model that could be used as a manipulation and hypnotic technique. It's far more interesting than I first thought.

The referred article proposes a system that tags incoming text with five different emotions: happiness, surprise, sadness, wrath and fear. It would be really interesting to know to what extent the discourses of Barack Obama apply for each of these emotions.

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[Garcia and Alias, 2008] Garcia, D. and Alias, F., "Emotion identification from text using semantic disambiguation", Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, n. 40, (ISSN: 1135-5948), pp. 67-74. (in Spanish)



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