Understanding user behavior aspects on emergency mobile applications during emergency communications using NLP and text mining techniques

Abstract. The use of mobile devices has been skyrocketing in our society. Users can access and share any type of information in a timely manner through these devices using different social media applications. This enabled users to increase their awareness of ongoing events such as election campaigns, sports updates, movie releases, disaster occurrences, and studies. The attractiveness, affordability, and two-way communication capabilities empowered these mobile devices that support various social media platforms to be central to emergency communication as well. This makes a mobile-based emergency application an attractive communication tool during emergencies. The emergence of mobile-based emergency communication has intrigued us to learn about the user behavior related to the usage of these applications. Our study was mainly conducted on emergency apps in Nordic countries such as Finland, Sweden, and Norway. To understand the user objects regarding the usage of emergency mobile applications we leveraged various Natural Language Processing and Text Mining techniques. VADER sentiment tool was used to predict and track users’ review polarity of a particular application over time. Lately, to identify factors that affect users’ sentiments, we employed topic modeling techniques such as the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. This model identifies various themes discussed in the user reviews and the result of each theme will be represented by the weighted sum of words in the corpus. Even though LDA succeeds in highlighting the user-related factors, it fails to identify the aspects of the user, and the topic definition from the LDA model is vague. Hence we leveraged Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) methods to extract the user aspects from the user reviews. To perform this task we consider fine-tuning DeBERTa (a variant of the BERT model). BERT is a Bidirectional Encoder Representation of transformer architecture which allows the model to learn the context in the text. Following this, we performed a sentence pair sentiment classification task using different variants of BERT. Later, we dwell on different sentiments to highlight the factors and the categories that impact user behavior most by leveraging the Empath categorization technique. Finally, we construct a word association by considering different Ontological vocabularies related to mobile applications and emergency response and management systems. The insights from the study can be used to identify the user aspect terms, predict the sentiment of the aspect term in the review provided, and find how the aspect term impacts the user perspective on the usage of mobile emergency applications

From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics

Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to analyse and process text. Vector space models (VSMs) of semantics are beginning to address these limits. This paper surveys the use of VSMs for semantic processing of text. We organize the literature on VSMs according to the structure of the matrix in a VSM. There are currently three broad classes of VSMs, based on term-document, word-context, and pair-pattern matrices, yielding three classes of applications. We survey a broad range of applications in these three categories and we take a detailed look at a specific open source project in each category. Our goal in this survey is to show the breadth of applications of VSMs for semantics, to provide a new perspective on VSMs for those who are already familiar with the area, and to provide pointers into the literature for those who are less familiar with the field

Review on recent advances in information mining from big consumer opinion data for product design

In this paper, based on more than ten years' studies on this dedicated research thrust, a comprehensive review concerning information mining from big consumer opinion data in order to assist product design is presented. First, the research background and the essential terminologies regarding online consumer opinion data are introduced. Next, studies concerning information extraction and information utilization of big consumer opinion data for product design are reviewed. Studies on information extraction of big consumer opinion data are explained from various perspectives, including data acquisition, opinion target recognition, feature identification and sentiment analysis, opinion summarization and sampling, etc. Reviews on information utilization of big consumer opinion data for product design are explored in terms of how to extract critical customer needs from big consumer opinion data, how to connect the voice of the customers with product design, how to make effective comparisons and reasonable ranking on similar products, how to identify ever-evolving customer concerns efficiently, and so on. Furthermore, significant and practical aspects of research trends are highlighted for future studies. This survey will facilitate researchers and practitioners to understand the latest development of relevant studies and applications centered on how big consumer opinion data can be processed, analyzed, and exploited in aiding product design

Topic Modeling for Automatic Analysis of Natural Language: A Case Study in an Italian Customer Support Center

This paper focuses on the automatic analysis of conversation transcriptions in the call center of a customer care service. The goal is to recognize topics related to problems and complaints discussed in several dialogues between customers and agents. Our study aims to implement a framework able to automatically cluster conversation transcriptions into cohesive and well-separated groups based on the content of the data. The framework can alleviate the analyst selecting proper values for the analysis and the clustering processes. To pursue this goal, we consider a probabilistic model based on the latent Dirichlet allocation, which associates transcriptions with a mixture of topics in different proportions. A case study consisting of transcriptions in the Italian natural language, and collected in a customer support center of an energy supplier, is considered in the paper. Performance comparison of different inference techniques is discussed using the case study. The experimental results demonstrate the approach’s efficacy in clustering Italian conversation transcriptions. It also results in a practical tool to simplify the analytic process and off-load the parameter tuning from the end-user. According to recent works in the literature, this paper may be valuable for introducing latent Dirichlet allocation approaches in topic modeling for the Italian natural language

A Survey on Semantic Processing Techniques

Semantic processing is a fundamental research domain in computational linguistics. In the era of powerful pre-trained language models and large language models, the advancement of research in this domain appears to be decelerating. However, the study of semantics is multi-dimensional in linguistics. The research depth and breadth of computational semantic processing can be largely improved with new technologies. In this survey, we analyzed five semantic processing tasks, e.g., word sense disambiguation, anaphora resolution, named entity recognition, concept extraction, and subjectivity detection. We study relevant theoretical research in these fields, advanced methods, and downstream applications. We connect the surveyed tasks with downstream applications because this may inspire future scholars to fuse these low-level semantic processing tasks with high-level natural language processing tasks. The review of theoretical research may also inspire new tasks and technologies in the semantic processing domain. Finally, we compare the different semantic processing techniques and summarize their technical trends, application trends, and future directions.Comment: Published at Information Fusion, Volume 101, 2024, 101988, ISSN 1566-2535. The equal contribution mark is missed in the published version due to the publication policies. Please contact Prof. Erik Cambria for detail