LaughTrack: A Story

Pat Allan

http://twitter.com/pathttp://freelancing-gods.com

Comedy Addict

Melbourne

Melbourne International Comedy Festival

http://www.comedyfestival.com.au

Third-LargestComedy Festival

Who’s First?

Edinburgh Fringe

> 2000 shows

> 34,000 performances

Edinburgh 2008for three days

Edinburgh 2009for one month

EdTwinge

http://edtwinge.com/

What about Melbourne?

LaughTrack

Ben Webster

http://www.plus2.com.au/

Nathan Sampimon

http://inspire9.com.au/

Launched Yesterday

LaughTrack: The Code

Rails 2.3.5

Sphinx &Thinking Sphinxhttp://ts.freelancing-gods.com

Bundler 0.9.10

http://github.com/carlhuda/bundler

Machinist

http://github.com/notahat/machinist

Formtastic

http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic

Sprinkle &Passenger Stack

http://github.com/crafterm/sprinklehttp://github.com/benschwarz/passenger-stack

Throne

http://github.com/lstoll/throne

CouchDB

http://couchdb.apache.org

Why CouchDB?

1. It speaks in JSON

Twitter speaks in JSON

2. Peers

• Jan Lenhardt

• Lena Herrmann

• Alexander Lang

• Ben Schwarz

• Lincoln Stoll

• Paul Campbell

Only Tweets in CouchDB

Tracking Sentiment

Really Hard

Typos

Sarcasm

Abiguity

“Dave Hughes is the shit.”

“Dave Hughes is shit.”

1. Key Words & Phrases

... with manual confirmation

2. Bayesian Filter

... with somelanguage processing

Pedantic

http://github.com/freelancing-god/pedantic

Emoticons

:) => smile

Common Typos

reaaaalllly => really

Contractions

can’t => cannot

SMS Shortcuts

tnx => thanks

Self-Censorship

sh*t => shit

Common Words

a an and as but by how I if in my no now of to

URLs

http://bit.ly http://tinyurl.com

Stemming

wandering => wander

Why?

Just the Important Parts

Not yet live.

Not yet reliable...

Twitter is bloody noisy!

Laughtrack needs reviews

Not personal attacks

Not professions of love

Not tweets that you’re about to see a show

Not tweets about Spicks and Specks, etc

Not retweets

Culling noise istricky too

A work in progress

Open Source

http://github.com/freelancing-god/laughtrack

Fork and Patch!

Questions?

http://laughtrack.com.au