Analyzing human intentions in natural language text

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the idea of Intent Analysis, which is to create a profile of the goals and intentions present in textual content. Intent Analysis, similar to Sentiment Analysis, represents a type of document classification that differs from traditional topic categorization by focusing on classification by intent. We investigate the extent to which the automatic analysis of human intentions in text is feasible and report our preliminary results, and discuss potential applications. In addition, we present results from a study that focused on evaluating intent profiles generated from transcripts of American presidential candidate speeches in 2008.