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Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

shouldisendit.com

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Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#21

Post by tyingq »

andischo wrote: post #9

Having written my bachelor's thesis on how negation in sentences affects their sentiment: it is really, really difficult. Even just differentiating between negative/neutral/positive sentiment is successful only about ~65% of the time (depending on the source material). Text based Irony/Sarcasm detection is still an unsolved problem (most of the times even for humans, as it is strongly context dependent, not to mentio…

Tried "I'm super thrilled to clean up your mess. Thanks!" and it does indeed get a smiley face (vs neutral or negative) with this tool.

It did, though, do a fairly good job classifying the last 20 emails from my outbox. I tend to avoid sarcasm in emails.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#22

Post by ptk921 »

Looks interesting, I'm excited to try it out. I had trouble parsing the "Understanding Mood" paragraph. Consider this a pull request.

> What if you could get a mood score for emails you receive or send? A way to quickly sense check what you are about to send without your bias emotion or when receiving an email remove your current mood or maybe a currently negative relationship with the sender.

ShouldISendIt provides a mood score for emails you send or receive? When sending, quickly get a sense of the mood that your message communicates from an objective algorithm. When receiving messages, our tool can help you see past your current disposition or preconceive notions of the sender's intent.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#23

Post by andischo »

diminoten wrote: post #13
andischo wrote: post #9

Having written my bachelor's thesis on how negation in sentences affects their sentiment: it is really, really difficult. Even just differentiating between negative/neutral/positive sentiment is successful only about ~65% of the time (depending on the source material). Text based Irony/Sarcasm detection is still an unsolved problem (most of the times even for humans, as it is strongly context dependent, not to mentio…

So does this mean something like crowd sourced scoring of sentiment does better than algorithmic detection? Or do people suck just as badly?

Short answer: yes, crowd sourcing would work better.

Long answer: It's difficult to determine how good/bad people actually are at detecting the correct sentiment, as data sets containing phrase/sentence sentiment pairs are often created by majority decision of human taggers. E.g. 7 people are given the same training examples and whatever most of them choose is then used as "correct" answer (gold standard). This might not be the real correct answer though. However, even if we accept this gold standard to actually be the absolute truth, most humans only have a correct detection rate of about ~80% (this is a very rough number, as it depends strongly on the source material, e.g. Tweets, product reviews, etc.). Still, this is way better than computers perform at the moment.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#24

Post by sailfast »

Sujan wrote: post #4

For anyone wondering how it works: > - The chrome extension doesn’t read the content of your web pages. > - The chrome extension only reads your highlighted text when you click the extension smile icon. > - Your highlighted text is passed from your browser to our API where the sentiment is calculated, we do not store in any way the text you highlight. https://www.rarely.io/work/should-i-send-it

I appreciate you for saying that you don't store the text, but the fact that it has been sent, processed, and then returned means that this practice could change any time and I'd never know.

If I were to use this for work-related reasons it would need to live in a more on-prem / secured format where I could ensure this via controls.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#25

Post by def8cefe »

lettergram wrote: post #20

IMO add a gif of the system working right on the front page (similar to https://getstation.com/ ) It’ll drive more conversions. Also after working on sentiment analysis for a long time, you should let each user build their own model with tensorflow.js. That may be a down the line kind of thing, but otherwise your model will be fairly inaccurate. I say this having worked heavily in the space: https://hnprofile.com/

It doesn't seem like HNProfile is particularly accurate. It seems to interpret terse comments as unhappy, and all my interests listed come from a single comment thread a couple months ago discussing Canadian regions instead of anything technical I have talked about.

I will say that I'm unhappy that you've built a chart on what you percieve my mood to be and published it without my consent.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#26

Post by ianmcgowan »

It's a neat idea, but after too many sarcastic, "clever", trying-to-be-funny, defensive, et al emails in my career I have a simpler heuristic. If I have to ask myself "should I send it?", the answer is no. Leave it in drafts (with no one in the to: line!) until either things have cooled down and I delete it, or there's more perspective and it's actually ok to send.

I have too many fails to tell, but the worst ever was an email from a middle manager I didn't know at BigCo, cc: upper management. It blamed an issue on my team at the time, and I took it as an attack. For once there actually was no issue, and in my reply I managed to subtly rub in that they apparently didn't understand how their own dept. worked. CC: upper management still of course. It worked too well, and the person called me crying an hour later because they looked like an idiot to the big cheeses. As soon as we talked on the phone, they became a real person to me, and I felt like the utter dick that I had been.

Moral of the story, there are real people with real feelings on the other end of your words. It's almost never worth it to be a dick, slightly off color, or sarcastic, save that for in-person ;-)

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#27

Post by gcatalfamo »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #26

It's a neat idea, but after too many sarcastic, "clever", trying-to-be-funny, defensive, et al emails in my career I have a simpler heuristic. If I have to ask myself "should I send it?", the answer is no. Leave it in drafts (with no one in the to: line!) until either things have cooled down and I delete it, or there's more perspective and it's actually ok to send. I have too many fails to tell, but the worst ever wa…

> If I have to ask myself "should I send it?", the answer is no.

Exactly.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#28

Post by flamtap »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #26

It's a neat idea, but after too many sarcastic, "clever", trying-to-be-funny, defensive, et al emails in my career I have a simpler heuristic. If I have to ask myself "should I send it?", the answer is no. Leave it in drafts (with no one in the to: line!) until either things have cooled down and I delete it, or there's more perspective and it's actually ok to send. I have too many fails to tell, but the worst ever wa…

My rule of thumb for email correspondence is the "you idiot" rule.

If the email could be appended with the words "you idiot" without changing the overall tone, then I need to rephrase.

Re: Show HN: Should I Send It? Helping you understand your mood in emails

#30

Post by [deleted] »

andischo wrote: post #23
diminoten wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does this mean something like crowd sourced scoring of sentiment does better than algorithmic detection? Or do people suck just as badly?

Short answer: yes, crowd sourcing would work better. Long answer: It's difficult to determine how good/bad people actually are at detecting the correct sentiment, as data sets containing phrase/sentence sentiment pairs are often created by majority decision of human taggers. E.g. 7 people are given the same training examples and whatever most of them choose is then used as "correct" answer (gold standard). This might…

[deleted]
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