A Unified Dual-view Model for Review Summarization and Sentiment Classification with Inconsistency Loss

Acquiring accurate summarization and sentiment from user reviews is an essential component of modern e-commerce platforms. Review summarization aims at generating a concise summary that describes the key opinions and sentiment of a review, while sentiment classification aims to predict a sentiment label indicating the sentiment attitude of a review. To effectively leverage the shared sentiment information in both review summarization and sentiment classification tasks, we propose a novel dual-view model that jointly improves the performance of these two tasks. In our model, an encoder first learns a context representation for the review, then a summary decoder generates a review summary word by word. After that, a source-view sentiment classifier uses the encoded context representation to predict a sentiment label for the review, while a summary-view sentiment classifier uses the decoder hidden states to predict a sentiment label for the generated summary. During training, we introduce an inconsistency loss to penalize the disagreement between these two classifiers. It helps the decoder to generate a summary to have a consistent sentiment tendency with the review and also helps the two sentiment classifiers learn from each other. Experiment results on four real-world datasets from different domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.Comment: Accepted by SIGIR 2020. Updated the results of balanced accuracy scores in Table 3 since we found a bug in our source code. Nevertheless, our model still achieves higher balanced accuracy scores than the baselines after we fixed this bu

Review-based collaborative recommender system using deep learning methods

Recommender systems have been widely adopted to assist users in purchasing and increasing sales. Collaborative filtering techniques have been identified to be the most popular methods used for the recommendation system. One major drawback of these approaches is the data sparsity problem, which generally leads to low performances of the recommender systems. Recent development has shown that user review texts can be exploited to tackle the issue of data sparsity thereby improving the accuracy of the recommender systems. However, the problem with existing methods for the review-based recommender system is the use of handcrafted features which makes the system less accurate. Thus, to address the above issue, this study proposed collaborative recommender system models that utilize user textual reviews based on deep learning methods for improving predictive performances of recommender systems. To extract the product aspects to mine users‟ opinion, an aspect extraction method was first developed using a Multi-Channel Convolutional Neural Network. An aspect-based recommender system was then designed by integrating the opinions of users based on the product aspects into the collaborative filtering method for the recommendation process. To further improve the predictive performance, the fine-grained user-item interaction based on the aspect-based collaborative method was studied and a sentiment-aware recommender system was also designed using a deep learning method. Extensive series of experiments were conducted on real-world datasets from the Semeval-014, Amazon, and Yelp reviews to evaluate the performances of the proposed models from both the aspect extraction and rating prediction. Experimental results showed that the proposed aspect extraction model performed better than compared methods such as rule-based and the neural network-based approaches, with average gains of 5.2%, 12.0%, and 7.5% in terms of Precision, Recall, and F1 score, respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed aspect-based collaborative methods demonstrated better performances compared to benchmark approaches such as topic modelling techniques with an average improvement of 6.5% and 8.0% in terms of the Root Means Squared Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE), respectively. Statistical T-test was conducted and the results showed that all the performance improvements were significant at P<0.05. This result indicates the effectiveness of utilizing the multi-channel convolutional neural network for better extraction accuracy. The findings also demonstrate the advantage of utilizing user textual reviews and the deep learning methods for improving the predictive accuracy in recommendation systems

Contextual Understanding of Sequential Data Across Multiple Modalities

In recent years, progress in computing and networking has made it possible to collect large volumes of data for various different applications in data mining and data analytics using machine learning methods. Data may come from different sources and in different shapes and forms depending on their inherent nature and the acquisition process. In this dissertation, we focus specifically on sequential data, which have been exponentially growing in recent years on platforms such as YouTube, social media, news agency sites, and other platforms. An important characteristic of sequential data is the inherent causal structure with latent patterns that can be discovered and learned from samples of the dataset. With this in mind, we target problems in two different domains of Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing that deal with sequential data and share the common characteristics of such data. The first one is action recognition based on video data, which is a fundamental problem in computer vision. This problem aims to find generalized patterns from videos to recognize or predict human actions. A video contains two important sets of information, i.e. appearance and motion. These information are complementary, and therefore an accurate recognition or prediction of activities or actions in video data depend significantly on our ability to extract them both. However, effective extraction of these information is a non-trivial task due to several challenges, such as viewpoint changes, camera motions, and scale variations, to name a few. It is thus crucial to design effective and generalized representations of video data that learn these variations and/or are invariant to such variations. We propose different models that learn and extract spatio-temporal correlations from video frames by using deep networks that overcome these challenges. The second problem that we study in this dissertation in the context of sequential data analysis is text summarization in multi-document processing. Sentences consist of sequence of words that imply context. The summarization task requires learning and understanding the contextual information from each sentence in order to determine which subset of sentences forms the best representative of a given article. With the progress made by deep learning, better representations of words have been achieved, leading in turn to better contextual representations of sentences. We propose summarization methods that combine mathematical optimization, Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs), and deep learning models that outperform the state of the art in multi-document text summarization