5,756 research outputs found
Measuring relative opinion from location-based social media: A case study of the 2016 U.S. presidential election
Social media has become an emerging alternative to opinion polls for public
opinion collection, while it is still posing many challenges as a passive data
source, such as structurelessness, quantifiability, and representativeness.
Social media data with geotags provide new opportunities to unveil the
geographic locations of users expressing their opinions. This paper aims to
answer two questions: 1) whether quantifiable measurement of public opinion can
be obtained from social media and 2) whether it can produce better or
complementary measures compared to opinion polls. This research proposes a
novel approach to measure the relative opinion of Twitter users towards public
issues in order to accommodate more complex opinion structures and take
advantage of the geography pertaining to the public issues. To ensure that this
new measure is technically feasible, a modeling framework is developed
including building a training dataset by adopting a state-of-the-art approach
and devising a new deep learning method called Opinion-Oriented Word Embedding.
With a case study of the tweets selected for the 2016 U.S. presidential
election, we demonstrate the predictive superiority of our relative opinion
approach and we show how it can aid visual analytics and support opinion
predictions. Although the relative opinion measure is proved to be more robust
compared to polling, our study also suggests that the former can advantageously
complement the later in opinion prediction
Combination of Domain Knowledge and Deep Learning for Sentiment Analysis of Short and Informal Messages on Social Media
Sentiment analysis has been emerging recently as one of the major natural
language processing (NLP) tasks in many applications. Especially, as social
media channels (e.g. social networks or forums) have become significant sources
for brands to observe user opinions about their products, this task is thus
increasingly crucial. However, when applied with real data obtained from social
media, we notice that there is a high volume of short and informal messages
posted by users on those channels. This kind of data makes the existing works
suffer from many difficulties to handle, especially ones using deep learning
approaches. In this paper, we propose an approach to handle this problem. This
work is extended from our previous work, in which we proposed to combine the
typical deep learning technique of Convolutional Neural Networks with domain
knowledge. The combination is used for acquiring additional training data
augmentation and a more reasonable loss function. In this work, we further
improve our architecture by various substantial enhancements, including
negation-based data augmentation, transfer learning for word embeddings, the
combination of word-level embeddings and character-level embeddings, and using
multitask learning technique for attaching domain knowledge rules in the
learning process. Those enhancements, specifically aiming to handle short and
informal messages, help us to enjoy significant improvement in performance once
experimenting on real datasets.Comment: A Preprint of an article accepted for publication by Inderscience in
IJCVR on September 201
Econometrics meets sentiment : an overview of methodology and applications
The advent of massive amounts of textual, audio, and visual data has spurred the development of econometric methodology to transform qualitative sentiment data into quantitative sentiment variables, and to use those variables in an econometric analysis of the relationships between sentiment and other variables. We survey this emerging research field and refer to it as sentometrics, which is a portmanteau of sentiment and econometrics. We provide a synthesis of the relevant methodological approaches, illustrate with empirical results, and discuss useful software
Cross-domain sentiment classification using a sentiment sensitive thesaurus
Automatic classification of sentiment is important for numerous applications such as opinion mining, opinion summarization, contextual advertising, and market analysis. However, sentiment is expressed differently in different domains, and annotating corpora for every possible domain of interest is costly. Applying a sentiment classifier trained using labeled data for a particular domain to classify sentiment of user reviews on a different domain often results in poor performance. We propose a method to overcome this problem in cross-domain sentiment classification. First, we create a sentiment sensitive distributional thesaurus using labeled data for the source domains and unlabeled data for both source and target domains. Sentiment sensitivity is achieved in the thesaurus by incorporating document level sentiment labels in the context vectors used as the basis for measuring the distributional similarity between words. Next, we use the created thesaurus to expand feature vectors during train and test times in a binary classifier. The proposed method significantly outperforms numerous baselines and returns results that are comparable with previously proposed cross-domain sentiment classification methods. We conduct an extensive empirical analysis of the proposed method on single and multi-source domain adaptation, unsupervised and supervised domain adaptation, and numerous similarity measures for creating the sentiment sensitive thesaurus
Weakly-supervised appraisal analysis
This article is concerned with the computational treatment of Appraisal, a Systemic Functional Linguistic theory of the types of language employed to communicate opinion in English. The theory considers aspects such as Attitude (how writers communicate their point of view), Engagement (how writers align themselves with respect to the opinions of others) and Graduation (how writers amplify or diminish their attitudes and engagements). To analyse text according to the theory we employ a weakly-supervised approach to text classification, which involves comparing the similarity of words with prototypical examples of classes. We evaluate the method's performance using a collection of book reviews annotated according to the Appraisal theory
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