FEATURE12 November 2014

Mum’s the word

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At the beginning of the year we were asked by a supermarket chain – which was looking to better inform its summer campaigns – to look at how mothers talk about the season, theme and concept of ‘summer’.

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We pulled out four months’ worth of posts from two large mothers forums where summer was mentioned in the thread title. We processed two million words; to put that into some context, the entire set of seven Harry Potter books comes to a shade fewer than one million words.

At this point it’s worth explaining how we work at Relative Insight. We turn sets of language into fairly complex data models, store them, and because we always follow the same process, we can then compare those models to surface the differences and similarities to each other. We look at the words themselves, the grammar used, the semantic topics of conversation, the style of language, and any metadata we can pick up such as who, where, and when. It’s the culmination of ten years of research and development at Lancaster University, originally designed to catch bad guys online in the field of child protection (which we still do).

It’s not just what you ...