How Does This Article Make You Feel? – Times Open

Last year, the Advertising team at The New York Times asked a question: could we accurately predict the emotions that are evoked by Times articles? If so, we could empower advertisers to place ads more relevant to the context in which they are shown. To explore this idea, The Times's Data Science team launched Project Feels, a project to understand and predict the emotional impact of Times articles. In a nutshell, we built prediction algorithms with large amounts of data collected via crowdsourcing. Our predictions made sense qualitatively, and we ran successful experiments demonstrating that readers' emotional response positively correlated with engagement on articles.