Australian researchers develop real-time emotion online tool

Australian researchers has developed a new online tool called "We Feel" which analyses words from millions of tweets to display a real-time view of our emotions, a statement from Australia's national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), said Monday.

According to this statement, this tool, which was developed for the Black Dog Institute, in partnership with Amazon Web Services, aims to help researchers understand how our emotions fluctuate over time due to changes in social, economic and environmental factors such as weather, time of day, news of a natural disaster or announcements about the economy, Xinhua reported.

The Black Dog Institute is a world leader in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mood disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder.

Cecile Paris,research leader in language and social computing at CSIRO's Digital Productivity and Services Flagship, confirmed that "We Feel" looks for up to 600 specific words in a stream of around 27 million tweets per day and maps them to a hierarchy of emotions which includes love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear.

"You can explore emotional trends on a minute by minute time scale, across locations around the globe and gender to further refine the results," Cecile Paris added.