The Pune Chapter of ACM India invites you for a Tech Talk on “Wishful thinking – Finding ‘wishes’ from natural language text”, by Ramanand J, a researcher at Cognizant, on 2 July, Saturday, at 10am. The talk will be in CSI Pune Office, Prabhat House, Damle Path, Behind INDSEARCH, Law College Road. This is a free event, anybody can attend, and no registration is required.

Abstract – Finding ‘wishes’ from natural language text

Embedded in the chatty bazaars of online social media are not just likes, raves, rants, and status updates, but also intentions: desires to buy, choices of consumption, and “would-like-to-have”-s. Finding these ‘wishes’ may be of use to both producers and consumers. The emerging area of sentiment analysis has been dissecting text to automatically detect opinions about a variety of entities. But what about these kinds of intentions?

In this talk, we look at some nascent research work on the novel problem of automatically discovering such ‘wishes’ from (English) documents such as reviews or customer surveys. These wishes are sentences in which authors make suggestions (especially for improvements) about a product or service or show intentions to purchase them. Such ‘wishes’ are of great use to product managers and sales personnel, and supplement the area of sentiment analysis by providing insights into the minds of consumers.

This will also provide an example of how text processing is being applied to interesting possibilities arising out of social media usage.

Speaker Profile – Ramanand J

Ramanand J is a researcher with Cognizant Technology Solutions, Pune. He studied at COEP and IIT Bombay, and specialized in areas related to natural language processing. At Cognizant, he works on problems related to sentiment analysis, social media, and data visualization. He’s a keen quizzer, does some writing when not being lazy, and has a list-fixation. His personal wish-list includes making a trip to Iceland one day and being born left-handed the next time around.

His homepage is at http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/~ramanand/

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. No registration required