Software for computing the emotional intensity of messages?

February 10, 2014 6:03 PM

Remember around 2000 when the Eudora e-mail program came with Moodwatch, which claimed to find out how "hot" your messages were running by looking for swear words (and maybe sarcasm, I'm not sure?) I wonder, is there free or open source software somewhere that has done the same thing? Or has anyone reverse-engineered Moodwatch to figure out how it works?
posted by steinsaltz to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

A story about Moodwatch: Its language filter once rejected my email to a client, the FAG Corp. in Germany. I think Eudora just prepared a dictionary of words they thought were naughty. The software was probably similar to a spell-check dictionary. (Hope somebody gives you a more technical answer.)
posted by JimN2TAW at 10:29 PM on February 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The technical term for this is sentiment analysis. Wikipedia is as good a start as any if you want to know how it's done. A bit of searching found this, an extension to outlook to check your outgoing email.
posted by smidgen at 12:04 AM on February 11, 2014

Best answer: I don't know how Moodwatch specifically works, but another system for identifying hostile email messages is explained in Smokey: Automatic Recognition of Hostile Messages.

Edit: on searching, I found a whitepaper about mood watch specifically.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 3:20 AM on February 11, 2014

Response by poster: Thank you. Turns out the Tonecheck plugin talks to an API produced by this company, which has a live demo for returning JSON such as "{dominant_emotion"=>"fear_uneasiness", "intensity"=>5.6}"
posted by steinsaltz at 7:56 AM on February 11, 2014

Response by poster: For anyone who finds this thread in the future: this list was really useful.
posted by steinsaltz at 8:02 AM on February 11, 2014