Introducing empathy

Empathy is complex. Many animals show signs of understanding the concept of empathy; of course, humans do, as do chimps, elephants, and crows.

To get an understanding of how complex it truly is, and how simple we think it is, if I were to ask you when you learned empathy, what would you answer? You'd probably think it's a trick question. But you'd be wrong—empathy is a learned skill; it's acquired, just like human facial recognition.

Note

The Oxford Dictionary defines empathy as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

In this chapter, while we won't simulate the ability to understand feelings per se, we will create an application that can understand the intended sentiment of a certain natural language passage.

From there, we'll take a look at another aspect of empathy—understanding an individual’s personality based on the way they write.

Understanding the complexities of sentiment

Sentiment is complex because it's a human feeling, and it's represented in...