Email tone checker

[mattbell]

This company promises to help you check the tone of your emails before sending them.  I have no idea how well it works, but it could be a great idea if implemented well.  I could see offering a variety of plugins for correcting specific issues -- eg you could create a filter to help you use Non-Violent Communication or apply Gottman's principles for communication. 

Comments

[nancyblue.livejournal.com]

Very interesting idea. As I teach exclusively online, I deal with a variety of literacy issues in my courses. As you might imagine, this can impact the tone and ways in which a person is read not only in e-mails but also on discussion boards and in learning collaboration. It would be fascinating to know the ways in which this was developed and the different registers in which it might operate.

[paul bohm (from livejournal.com)]

i fucking need this for comments!

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

This comment's tone is described as "needy". :-)

[traumentwerfer.livejournal.com]

I totally wanted to do this, ah well, they beat me to it.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

It's a new field. I'm sure there's room for at least one competitor.

[sarcazm.livejournal.com]

and yet they still haven't come out with proper html or at least some sort of font to denote sarcasm yet. i have been waiting for a very very long time on that one.

[proctologiste.livejournal.com]

Previous work in this field: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snark_mark#Snark_mark

[sarcazm.livejournal.com]

i like the snark mark, and also i use the /sarcasm from my irc days, but it's a bit heavy-handed even still. /s doesn't work anymore because of the strikethrough html. unfortunately, since the .~ hasn't really caught on, not many people would really be able to communicate properly in a sarcastic fashion, now would they?

perhaps i should attempt to spread it around a bit more like a new-fangled version of internet-based punctuation plague.

[proctologiste.livejournal.com]

Mirroring Matt Bell's suggestion below, I actually use this emoticon almost instead of punctuation: :>

It represents mild facetiousness and/or playfullness, which generally pervades my prose :>

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

What about ;-) ?

[proctologiste.livejournal.com]

Looks like sentiment analysis is getting more "mainstream".

PG reports that sentiment analysis of twitter and facebook was one of the top product ideas for the most recent YCombinator application cycle.

Based on their website, it seems they're just applying a sentiment corpus of some sort (e.g. http://www.cs.pitt.edu/mpqa/) to n-grams. A straightforward approach that does indeed accomplish what they set out to do. Often sentiment analysis is claimed to perform more than it does--particularly when you're trying to determine someone's actual feelings about a brand or something like that, rather than using either aggregate measures (overall topic sentiment in a large group) or rating specific usages like ToneCheck does.

Applying something like NVC would likely require discourse modeling, which is an area rife for commercialization as academic work in that area is getting more and more advanced.