An Emotional Word Analyzer for Portuguese

The analysis of sentiments, emotions and opinions in texts is increasingly important in the current digital world. The existing lexicons with emotional annotations for the Portuguese language are oriented to polarities, classifying words as positive, negative or neutral. To identify the emotional load intended by the author it is necessary also to categorize the emotions expressed by individual words. EmoSpell is an extension of a morphological analyzer with semantic annotations of the emotional value of words. It uses Jspell as the morphological analyzer and a new dictionary with emotional annotations. This dictionary incorporates the lexical base EMOTAIX.PT, which classifies words based on three different levels of emotions - global, specific and intermediate. This paper describes the generation of the EmoSpell dictionary using three sources, the Jspell Portuguese dictionary and the lexical bases EMOTAIX.PT and SentiLex-PT. Also, this paper details the web application and web service that exploit this dictionary. It presents also a validation of the proposed approach using a corpus of student texts with different emotional loads. The validation compares the analyses provided by EmoSpell with the mentioned emotional lexical bases on the ability to recognize emotional words and extract the dominant emotion from a text

Multivariate Comparison of Experts\u27 Versus Users\u27 Reviews Online

This study aims to compare and contrast professional critics’ movie reviews with those of general public users’ to understand the differences and similarities between both and its effect. This will allow better informed decisions to be made highlighting when and for what ends the use of each type is more appropriate. This study analyzes length, ease of reading, sentiment analysis, main topics, emotional tones and the effect of time to evaluate the reviews. All the data used in this study pertains to the movie Avatar and was obtained from the IMDb movie database online. The research conducted found that while critics’ and users’ reviews may truly have some generally expected differences in fields like length or ease of reading, they may also present unexpected similarities in others that include, but are not limited to, the polarity, the main topics and even certain emotional tones of the reviews. Evaluating how users’ reviews changed over time additionally allows for a comprehension of the change in sentiment with the gradual distancing from the movie release date

Different Lexicon-Based Approaches to Emotion Identification in Portuguese Tweets (Short Paper)

This paper presents the existing literature on the identification of emotions and describes various lexica-based approaches and translation strategies to identify emotions in Portuguese tweets. A dataset of tweets was manually annotated to evaluate our classifier and also to assess the difficulty of the task. A lexicon-based approach was used in order to classify the presence or absence of eight different emotions in a tweet. Different strategies have been applied to refine and improve an existing and widely used lexicon, by means of automatic machine translation and aligned word embeddings. We tested six different classification approaches, exploring different ways of directly applying resources available for English by means of different translation strategies. The achieved results suggest that a better performance can be obtained both by improving a lexicon and by directly translating tweets into English and then applying an existing English lexicon

The Impact of the Covid-19 Cases with Twitter Users in Their Perception of the Brazilian Government

During the COVID-19 pandemic, political discussions in Brazil revolved around the pandemic and the controversial leader Jair Bolsonaro. Twitter reflected these discussions, also bringing reports of user dramas that had family members victimized by Covid-19. This study investigates their perception of the federal government through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these users’ tweets. We have identified 3,756 Twitter users who reported cases of family members with Covid-19 and collected their government-related tweets before and after those reports. We analyzed the feelings expressed in these tweets using automated techniques and extracted a sample of 650 tweets that had difficult-to-understand terms for a manual analysis of the feelings. The study found subtle changes in the perceptions of people who approve or disapprove of the federal government

Abnormal processing of emotional prosody in Williams syndrome: an event-related potentials study

Williams syndrome (WS), a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder due to a microdeletion in chromosome 7, is described as displaying an intriguing socio-cognitive phenotype. Deficits in prosody production and comprehension have been consistently reported in behavioral studies. It remains, however, to be clarified the neurobiological processes underlying prosody processing in WS. This study aimed at characterizing the electrophysiological response to neutral, happy, and angry prosody in WS, and examining if this response was dependent on the semantic content of the utterance. A group of 12 participants (5 female and 7male), diagnosed with WS, with age range between 9 and 31 years, was compared with a group of typically developing participants, individually matched for chronological age, gender and laterality. After inspection of EEG artifacts, data from 9 participants with WS and 10 controls were included in ERP analyses. Participants were presented with neutral, positive and negative sentences, in two conditions: (1) with intelligible semantic and syntactic information; (2) with unintelligible semantic and syntactic information (‘pure prosody’ condition). They were asked to decide which emotion was underlying the auditory sentence. Atypical event-related potentials (ERP) components were related with prosodic processing (N100, P200, N300) in WS. In particular, reduced N100 was observed for prosody sentences with semantic content; more positive P200 for sentences with semantic content, in particular for happy and angry intonations; and reduced N300 for both types of sentence conditions. These findings suggest abnormalities in early auditory processing, indicating a bottomup contribution to the impairment in emotional prosody processing and comprehension. Also, at least for N100 and P200, they suggest the top-down contributions of semantic processes in the sensory processing of speech. This study showed, for the first time, that abnormalities in ERP measures of early auditory processing in WS are also present during the processing of emotional vocal information. This may represent a physiological signature of underlying impaired on-line language and socio-emotional processing.This work was supported by a Doctoral Grant (SFRH/BD/35882/2007) awarded to APP, as well as by the grant PIC/IC/83290/2007Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Extraction of opinionated profiles from comments on web news

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Chatbot development to assist patients in health care services

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia InformáticaDados de alta qualidade sobre tratamentos médicos e de informação técnica tornaram-se acessíveis, criando novas oportunidades de E-Saúde para a recuperação de um paciente. A implementação da aprendizagem automática nestas soluções provou ser essencial e eficaz na elaboração de aplicações para o utilizador para aliviar a sobrecarga do sector de saúde. Atualmente, muitas interações com os utentes são realizadas via telefonemas e mensagens de texto. Os agentes de conversação podem responder a estas questões, fomentando uma rápida interação com os pacientes. O objetivo fundamental desta dissertação é prestar apoio aos pacientes, fornecendo uma fonte de informação fidedigna que lhes permita instruir-se e esclarecer dúvidas sobre os procedimentos e repercussões dos seus problemas de saúde. Este propósito foi concretizado não apenas através de uma plataforma Web intuitiva e acessível, composta por perguntas frequentes, mas também integrando um agente de conversação inteligente para responder a questões. Para este fim, cientificamente, foi necessário conduzir a investigação, implementação e viabilidade dos agentes de conversação no domínio fechado para os cuidados de saúde. Constitui um importante contributo para a comunidade de desenvolvimento de chatbots, na qual se reúnem as últimas inovações e descobertas, bem os desafios actuais da aprendizagem automática, contribuindo para a consciencialização desta área.High-quality data on medical treatments and facility-level information has become accessible, creating new eHealth opportunities for the recuperation of a patient. Machine learning implementation in these solutions has been proven to be essential and effective in building user-centred applications to relieves the burden on the healthcare sector. Nowadays, many patient interactions are handled through healthcare services via phone calls and text message exchange. Conversation agents can provide answers to these queries, promoting fast patient interaction. The underlying aim of this dissertation is to assist patients by providing a reliable source of information to educate themselves and clarify any doubts about procedures and implications of their health issue. This purpose was achieved not only through an intuitive and accessible web platform, with frequently asked questions, but also by integrating an intelligent chatting agent to answer questions. To this end, scientifically, it was necessary to conduct the research, implementation and feasibility of closed-domain conversation agents for healthcare. It is a valuable input for the chatbot development community, which assembles the latest innovations and findings, as well as the current challenges of machine learning, contributing to the awareness of this field

6th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies SLATE 2017

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio