maartenJacobs/horoscopes — Issue #5: Language Processing
Author: maartenJacobs
Created: 2012-02-16 22:34:10+00:00
State: open
Labels: Feature

We've mentioned extracting the meaning of the horoscope a few times.
To explain what that's all about, here's a lovely example of the description of a horoscope item of today:

```xml

<a href='http://astrobix.com'>Astrobix.com:</a>
Your birth Moon sign is Taurus. Today the Moon is transiting through the eighth house from Taurus, in the sign Sagittarious.
This position is never considered a favorable one. You should remain extremely cautious today.
Refrain from taking any decision and lead a simple life today. Do not start a journey to any unknown place as there is a risk of losing your way.
<br /> <br />Never be slack about your food habits lest you may loose your appetite.
You should take care not to get involved in disputes with anybody today, failing which you may be subjected to humiliation.
You should not give or receive loans and avoid making fresh investments anywhere.<br /> <br />
You may feel weakness and pain in your body. You might feel mentally vulnerable too.
Your faith in religion may be tested today so keep your mind pure and protect yourself from evils.<br /> <br />
When in sign Sagittarius, the Moon passes through the Nakshatras of Ketu and Mercury.
Maintain distance from evil natured and unreligious people who may subject you to loss and anxiety. <br /><br />
Yellow color will be unlucky for you today. If you have an interest in going through the secret and deep aspects of destiny then you may carry the search forward today.
<br /><br />You may worship goddess Durga to get rid of the prevailing adverse situation. Avoid consuming alcoholic drinks today.<br />

```

If you haven't lost faith in humanity after reading that, congratulations!

This message is pretty clear: your day is going to be utter crap. Extracting that message however can be tricky.
However, there is an entire field of computer-human interaction called Natural Language Processing which does just that.
What we can do then is play around with NLP tutorials or read up on it and implement our own mood extraction from the horoscope data.
There is also a free class by Stanford Uni on NLP (like they did with Machine Learning and AI), which starts later this month.

These are my thoughts on the topic. I'll try to put more down when I can, to have a better image of what I think it means what we spoke briefly about.