[Wilya]

From http://hedonometer.org/about.html :

> “Why does the day of Osama Bin Laden’s death have such a low happiness score?”

> Many people presume this day will be one of clear positivity. While we do see positive words such as “celebration” appearing, the overall language of the day on Twitter reflected that a very negatively viewed character met a very negative end. It was a day of complex emotion which is best explored in the word shift for the day, rather than the single number of its average happiness.

That's.. a pretty dodgy statement. A more straightforward and honest explanation would have been "We use a bag of words approach which relies on the assumption that people use negative words when they feel down and positive words when they feel good. This sort of models gives good results in most simple cases, but doesn't handle complex cases, and can't take into account that people sometimes use the words "death" and "dead" in a positive way."

There's nothing wrong with using these sorts of basic models. That's what pretty much everyone who provides sentiment analysis does, and it's good enough for most cases. But there's no need to hide the limits of the system either.