To Simplify, Complexify

I remember an interview – years ago – with Benoit Mandelbrot talking about how he arrived at his famous fractal set. He quoted advice he got from his mentor, Julia:

To simplify, complexify!

This was, of course, in reference to imaginary numbers. By casting real numbers into their two dimensional imaginary counterparts, an extra degree of freedom is introduced. I’ve been taking this advice to heart when considering analysing social media for expressions of appraisal (the text mining problem formerly known as ‘sentiment mining’). Much research in this space tries to view the problem in a simple way  - positive and negative words, classifying whole documents, and so on. In this field, complexifying really means working back to a model – a rich description of social context, discourse context, linguistics and psychology – which aims to describe how these expressions of attitude end up in documents. Pushing for this model is already a big win. However, complexification has another great advantage – by proposing a rich model, one can find a principled component of that model to focus on and make valuable, incremental contributions to our understanding of the space.

The appraisal framework is a great place to start, and the work of Argamon et al, and Taboada are great examples of a more principled approach to this space.

Something that I’m having fun with just now is the relationship between appraisal and word sense. While much work in this space centers on building lists of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ words, examples like ‘strong smell’, ‘strong candidate’, ‘strong personality’, suggest that the adjective (in these examples) requires a fine, sense based analysis.

Update – I found the quote from Mandelbrot via Google’s book search:

Comments

[Livia Polanyi]

Complexify,yes. I have always found that simplifying probems, making those comforting assumptions that social, economic or linguistic phenomena could be treated theoretically as "perfect gasses" to be essentially self-defeating and wrong-headed. When context is not taken into account in initial approaches to compex phenomena of this sort, it always come back to haunt and simplifying theories often end up with strange one-off epicyclical solutions to problems seems as isoated which are really systemic. So, yes! Hurrah for complexity! Bring it on!

[Livia Polanyi]

Oh, yeah ... Happy New Year!!