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Running some superficial "sentiment analysis" neural net over scholarly work and basing any sort of analysis on that is a terrible idea for obvious reasons.

It is already a terrible idea for content moderation / sorting reviews / etc, and the stakes are lower.

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Don't understand why this keeps being downvoted. NLP is still in its infancy when it comes to detecting nuances of human communication. These are valid objections.

Moreover, scientific citations are amongst the worst candidates for sentiment analysis since authors often express no sentiment about cited papers at all, and often prefer to use dry, neutral tones when describing a paper's shortcomings.

You might need both general intelligence and a deep knowledge of the field to conclude an author noting that X discovered Y on the assumption of Z is not a neutral description but a stark emphasis of their differences, or possibly even straw-manning the original paper.

the goal is ease of use though, not serious analysis

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