31,975 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
XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework
Task-oriented dialog systems are becoming pervasive, and many companies
heavily rely on them to complement human agents for customer service in call
centers. With globalization, the need for providing cross-lingual customer
support becomes more urgent than ever. However, cross-lingual support poses
great challenges---it requires a large amount of additional annotated data from
native speakers. In order to bypass the expensive human annotation and achieve
the first step towards the ultimate goal of building a universal dialog system,
we set out to build a cross-lingual state tracking framework. Specifically, we
assume that there exists a source language with dialog belief tracking
annotations while the target languages have no annotated dialog data of any
form. Then, we pre-train a state tracker for the source language as a teacher,
which is able to exploit easy-to-access parallel data. We then distill and
transfer its own knowledge to the student state tracker in target languages. We
specifically discuss two types of common parallel resources: bilingual corpus
and bilingual dictionary, and design different transfer learning strategies
accordingly. Experimentally, we successfully use English state tracker as the
teacher to transfer its knowledge to both Italian and German trackers and
achieve promising results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted to EMNLP 2018 conferenc
Relevance of Unsupervised Metrics in Task-Oriented Dialogue for Evaluating Natural Language Generation
Automated metrics such as BLEU are widely used in the machine translation
literature. They have also been used recently in the dialogue community for
evaluating dialogue response generation. However, previous work in dialogue
response generation has shown that these metrics do not correlate strongly with
human judgment in the non task-oriented dialogue setting. Task-oriented
dialogue responses are expressed on narrower domains and exhibit lower
diversity. It is thus reasonable to think that these automated metrics would
correlate well with human judgment in the task-oriented setting where the
generation task consists of translating dialogue acts into a sentence. We
conduct an empirical study to confirm whether this is the case. Our findings
indicate that these automated metrics have stronger correlation with human
judgments in the task-oriented setting compared to what has been observed in
the non task-oriented setting. We also observe that these metrics correlate
even better for datasets which provide multiple ground truth reference
sentences. In addition, we show that some of the currently available corpora
for task-oriented language generation can be solved with simple models and
advocate for more challenging datasets
Recent Advances in Transfer Learning for Cross-Dataset Visual Recognition: A Problem-Oriented Perspective
This paper takes a problem-oriented perspective and presents a comprehensive
review of transfer learning methods, both shallow and deep, for cross-dataset
visual recognition. Specifically, it categorises the cross-dataset recognition
into seventeen problems based on a set of carefully chosen data and label
attributes. Such a problem-oriented taxonomy has allowed us to examine how
different transfer learning approaches tackle each problem and how well each
problem has been researched to date. The comprehensive problem-oriented review
of the advances in transfer learning with respect to the problem has not only
revealed the challenges in transfer learning for visual recognition, but also
the problems (e.g. eight of the seventeen problems) that have been scarcely
studied. This survey not only presents an up-to-date technical review for
researchers, but also a systematic approach and a reference for a machine
learning practitioner to categorise a real problem and to look up for a
possible solution accordingly
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