Secret-eye: A tool to quantify user's emotion and discussion issues through a web-based forum

Abstract

Receiving, synthesizing and communicating information to others are gradually more important. Information can be in many forms, and text can represent a lot of information that includes people's emotion. Emotion is usually measured through conducting a survey. For digital information, emotion can be expressed in words or emoticons. In this paper, we propose to quantify the user's perception in a web-based forum through analyzing words used by users. By determining the number of occurrences for each significant word in the forum, we measure the user's perception based on emotion and issues that they are discussing. Therefore, we implement a software tool called Secret-Eye that provides a platform to extract words in any web-based forum. The tool is implemented using C# language. It reads and filters the words before clustering them into emotion and facts. At the same time, all the significant words are counted according to the specified cluster. The tool also considers a few emoticons that are clustered as emotion. This approach is significant in identifying public opinion that can collect people's perception and discussion issues unobtrusively through case-based online forum. At this stage, the scope of this research is focused on a Malay language which will be extended to be used in other languages. The tool is important to Malaysian organizations, individuals and investigators who seek for public opinion as well as emotion through online forum. There are many tools for collecting public's perception, however, what is novel in this research is the use of case-based real time data collection method that highlights potential areas for using computer-based technology in quantifying public emotion and perception. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.