May All Your Wishes Come True: A Study of Wishes and How to Recognize Them

Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, pages 263–271, Boulder, Colorado, June 2009. c⃝2009 Association for Computational Linguistics May All Your Wishes Come True: A Study of Wishes and How to Recognize Them Andrew B. Goldberg, Nathanael Fillmore, David Andrzejewski Zhiting Xu, Bryan Gibson, Xiaojin Zhu Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA {goldberg, nathanae, andrzeje, zhiting, bgibson, jerryzhu}@cs.wisc.edu Abstract A wish is “a desire or hope for something to happen.” In December 2007, people from around the world offered up their wishes to be printed on confetti and dropped from the sky during the famous New Year’s Eve “ball drop” in New York City’s Times Square. We present an in-depth analysis of this collection of wishes. We then leverage this unique re- source to conduct the first study on building general “wish detectors” for natural language text. Wish detection complements traditional sentiment analysis and is valuable for collect- ing business intelligence and insights into the world’s wants and desires. We demonstrate the wish detectors’ effectiveness on domains as diverse as consumer product reviews and online political discussions. 1 Introduction Each year, New York City rings in the New Year with the famous “ball drop” in Times Square. In December 2007, the Times Square Alliance, co- producer of the Times Square New Year’s Eve Cele- bration, launched a Web site called the Virtual Wish- ing Wall1 that allowed people around the world to submit their New Year’s wishes. These wishes were then printed on confetti and dropped from the sky at midnight on December 31, 2007 in sync with the ball drop. We obtained access to this set of nearly 100,000 New Year’s wishes, which we call the “WISH cor- pus.” Table 1 shows a selected sample of the WISH 1http://www.timessquarenyc.org/nye/nye interactive.html corpus. Some are far-reaching fantasies and aspi- rations, while others deal with everyday concerns like economic and medical distress. We analyze this first-of-its-kind corpus in Section 2. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “wish” as “a desire or hope for something to hap- pen.” How wishes are expressed, and how such wishful expressions can be automatically recog- nized, are open questions in natural language pro- cessing. Leveraging the WISH corpus, we conduct the first study on building general “wish detectors” for natural language text, and demonstrate their ef- fectiveness on domains as diverse as consumer prod- uct reviews and online political discussions. Such wish detectors have tremendous value in collecting business intelligence and public opinions. We dis- cuss the wish detectors in Section 3, and experimen- tal results in Section 4. 1.1 Relation to Prior Work Studying wishes is valuable in at least two aspects: 1. Being a special genre of subjective expression, wishes add a novel dimension to sentiment analy- sis. Sentiment analysis is often used as an auto- matic market research tool to collect valuable busi- ness intelligence from online text (Pang and Lee, 2008; Shanahan et al., 2005; Koppel and Shtrim- berg, 2004; Mullen …

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