Tone analysis

Tone analysis refers to natural language processing and linguistic analysis methods for identifying the tone, emotion, and writing style in textual content. Key aspects:

Assesses non-literal intentions beyond the literal meaning.
Looks at phrasing, diction, and rhetorical strategies.
Categorizes tone as confident, joyful, analytical, tentative, etc.
Identifies stylistic features like repetition, imagery, simplicity.
Requires understanding nuance, subtlety, cultural contexts in language.
Applications in communication, business intelligence, literary analysis.

Approaches leverage linguistic resources and machine learning including supervised learning from human-annotated examples.

Challenges include properly interpreting sarcasm, irony, ambiguity and accounting for topical and cultural dependencies in language.

Tone analysis aims to computationally capture complex stylistic and pragmatic nuances in how things are expressed beyond just what is literally stated.