Buzz-terms like ‘the Semantic Web‘ are massively over-used, nonetheless it really is possible to do what was originally promised: allow a computer to understand the meaning of a particular article or piece of text, without human help. We all know that articles that mention David Cameron are political in essence, but can a computer know? By understand, I mean: be able to determine with a high probability, say, which words in a piece of text are the names of individuals; whether a ‘David Cameron’ referred to is really the Tory Party leader, based on the context of the article; and be able to go on to answer more of our questions about the afore-mentioned Cameron.

Why is this useful? Well, if a computer is capable of taking a mass of seemingly random articles – for example, the entire daily output of the world of blogging – and give us informed matches, rather than simple ‘textual’ matches, that saves human beings a lot of time. The computer can then use this understanding to tell us new things about the people or items we care about, in a way that conventional search-engines like Google can’t manage.

Sentiment analysis goes a step further. Using the understanding that an article might be political in nature, the computer analyses the precise language used to determine – for each ‘topic’ – whether references are generally ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, i.e. are people being nice to Cameron, or nasty to him? There are important implications for online debates. If you’re currently debating issue X, and happily providing positive coverage of a particular point, Y, you’d be particularly interested to hear about articles that are very critical of Y. If a computer was able to alert you to articles like this, that could save you a huge amount of reading, and reduce the chances that you commit yourself to a policy that has been refuted elsewhere. This approach is more likely to challenge your opinions, and to reduce the likelihood of Groupthink.

I’m currently trying out OpenAmpify‘s software, with a view to adding these capabilities to Poblish. While being able to search, link, and match articles from the political blogosphere is incredibly useful, I believe that we can go much further. The better we can understand articles with the help of technology, the more we can use that technology to inform online debates, to improve their quality, to make them less frustrating, and ultimately to improve decision-making.