Teacher:In this task, you are given books product reviews in English language. The goal is to classify the review as "POS" if the overall sentiment of the review is positive or as "NEG" if the overall sentiment of the review is negative.
Teacher: Now, understand the problem? Solve this instance: Smart Dogs, Dumb Authors . I couldn't even begin to count all the things Stanley Coren gets wrong in THE INTELLIGENCE OF DOGS. For instance, in one section he claims that dogs have the ability to do math but in another part of the book he claims they can't tell the difference between a tug toy and human skin. The first is clearly way beyond a dog's capacity, while the second is something which comes totally natural to them. How did Coren get things so backwards? And the "intelligence" tests he provides have nothing to do with intelligence but in how focused or driven a dog is to do the test (or game) while you're doing it. For instance, I tried one of the tests with my dog by putting a piece of food under a towel, then waited to see how long it took him to find the treat. I'd still be waiting if I hadn't decided he'd never look under that towel. Then I tried the same game by teasing my dog with one of his favorite toys. Then I hid it under the towel, and it took him less than a second to get that toy. So my dog is apparently both on the smarter and dumber ends of Coren's intelligence spectrum. (This is just one example, by the way: the whole idea of testing a dog's IQ like this is bogus.) And don't get me started on Coren's pedantic retelling of the alpha myth. Granted, he wrote this book before the latest research on wild wolf packs proved that there's no such thing as a dominance hierarchy, or an alpha wolf, or the rest of that alpha nonsense. Though, I doubt if even that data would change Coren's mind. After all, he seriously recommends rolling your dog over on its back every day and pulling one of the animal's hind legs in the air to create a posture which supposedly "signifies submission to the pack leader." (Really? Dogs use "signifiers" now?) The funny thing is, shortly after reading that passage I saw a wolf documentary on TV and the papa wolf did the exact opposite or what Coren recommends! He rolled over on HIS back and let the pups jump on top of him and bite his nose! They loved it! So I tried what the papa wolf did with his pups with my dog--an alpha male, if there ever was one--and HE loved it. And later that night, on our last walk, he was ten times as obedient to me than he had been before I'd mimicked the papa wolf's behavior. Again, Coren had everything exactly backwards to reality. This "through the looking glass" quality persists throughout the book, with Coren even saying that dogs are capable of hypothetical, symbolic, and conceptual thinking. Wha..? I'm sorry. I love dogs and I think they have wonderful abilities that should be honored and respected, but the abilities they DO have are geared for being a dog, not a mini-me with four legs and a tail. For one thing, fully one third of a dog's brain is devoted to processing olfactory information, and none to processing symbols and concepts. I think Coren needs to do a little more research on comparative neuroanatomy and actual wolf behavior before he makes more ridiculous claims like the ones he made in this inane book.
Student:
NEG