EquityBot: Capturing Emotions

In my ongoing research and development of EquityBot — a stock-trading bot* with a philanthropic personality, which is my residency project at Impakt Works — I’ve been researching various emotional models for humans.

The code I’m developing will try to make correlations between stock prices and group emotions on Twitter. It’s a daunting task and one where I’m not sure of the signal-to-noise ratio will be (see disclaimer). As an art experiment, I don’t know what will emerge from this, but it’s geeky and exciting.

In the last couple weeks, I’ve been creating a rudimentary system that will just capture words. A more complex system would use sentiment analysis algorithms. My time and budget is limited, so phase 1 will be a simple implementation.

I’ve been looking for some sort of emotional classification system. There are several competing models (of course).

My favorite is the Plutchik Wheel of Emotions, which was developed in 1980. It has a symmetrical look to it and apparently is deployed in various AI systems.

Other models such as the Lövheim cube of emotion are more recent and seem compelling at first. But it’s missing something critical: sadness or grief. Really? This is such a basic human emotion and when I saw it was absent, I tossed the cube model.

Back to the Plutchik model…my “Twitter bucket” captures certain words, from the color wheel above. I want enough words for a reasonable statistical correlation (about 2000 tweets/hour). Too many of one word will strain my little Linode server. For example, the word “happy” is a no-go since there thousands of Tweets with that word in it each minute.

Many people tweet about anger by just using the word “angry” or “anger”, so that’s an easy one. Same thing goes with boredom/boring/bored.

For other words, I need to go synonym-hunting, like: apprehension. The twitter stream with this word is just a trickle. I’ve mapped it to “worry” or “anxiety”, which shows up more often in tweets. It’s not quite correct, but reasonably close.

The word “terror” has completely lost it’s meaning, and now only refers to political discourse. I’m still trying to figure out a good synonym-map for terror: terrifying, terrify, terrible? It’s not quite right. There’s not a good word to represent that feeling of absolute fear.

This gets tricky and I’m walking into the dark valley of linguistics. I am well-aware of the pitfalls.

* Disclaimer:
EquityBot doesn’t actually trade stocks. It is an art project intended for illustrative purposes only, and is not intended as actual investment advice. EquityBot is not a licensed financial advisor. EquityBoy It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding any particular security or course of action.