Report this comment to a moderator

Tracking online word-of-mouth: The people vs machines debate

Most observers will agree, as do the authors it seems, that this is not a question of either/or. Much rather, it is about agreeing methods and standards that will deliver actual best-of-both-worlds results now and in the foreseeable future. In that sense, increased automation must be welcomed as it drives commoditisation by allowing the processing of vast amounts of data in ever-decreasing periods of time. So then this debate is really about where automation should end, and where human intervention should start. Non-English language is a key issue, and any long-term prediction must free itself from the 'cultural myopia' of English. Automated sentiment analysis in Mandarin, anyone? Semiotics, as a theory of communications, falls into syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. Machines are, and will be, better equipped to bulk-process information according to syntactic and semantic rules. However, meaning and understanding or, in a more targeted sense, impact, comes out of pragmatics. Machines will always only do what we tell them, so let's tell them as much as we can, and get them to compile and categorise ever more, 24/7. As a USP in media intelligence, however, we should continue to aim for the smartest humans, not the biggest or fastest machines. As with so many aspects of life, size is not everything.

16-Jun-2009

1:12 pm