How to identify ideas and concepts in a given text

Question

I'm working on a project at the moment where it would be really useful to be able to detect when a certain topic/idea is mentioned in the body of the text. For instance, if the text contained:

Maybe if you tell me a little more about who Mr. Jones is, that would help. It would also be useful if I could have a description of his appearance, or even better a photograph?

It'd be great to be able to detect that the person has asked for a photograph of Mr. Jones. I could take a really naïve approach and just look for the word "photo" or "photograph", but this would obviously be no good if they wrote something like:

Please, never send me a photo of Mr. Jones.

Does anyone know where to start with this? Is it even possible?

I've looked into things like nltk, but I've yet to find an example of someone doing something similar and am still not entirely sure what this kind of analysis is called. Any help that can get me off the ground would be great.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use automatic sentiment analysis as the study of emotions in the text can be conducted from two points of view. 

Firstly, one can investigate how emotions influence a writer of a text in choosing a certain amount of words and/or other linguistic elements. 

Secondly, anyone can investigate how a reader interprets his/her emotion in a text, and what linguistic clues are used to infer the emotion of the writer. In this text, we'll take the second point of view. We are interested in the way people infer emotions, so we can mimic this process in a computer program. In the remainder of this section, we will investigate how linguistic elements describing appraisal and action-readiness are used in texts to convey the emotion of the author, as they comprise the majority of clues to infer emotion from the text.

If you want to know about the Sentiment Analysis then visit this NLP Course.