192,335 research outputs found

    PREDICTING THE INDIVIDUAL MOOD LEVEL BASED ON DIARY DATA

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    Understanding mood changes of individuals with depressive disorders is crucial in order to guide personalized therapeutic interventions. Based on diary data, in which clients of an online depression treatment report their activities as free text, we categorize these activities and predict the mood level of clients. We apply a bag-of-words text-mining approach for activity categorization and explore recurrent neuronal networks to support this task. Using the identified activities, we develop partial ordered logit models with varying levels of heterogeneity among clients to predict their mood. We estimate the parameters of these models by employing Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques and compare the models regarding their predictive performance. Therefore, by combining text-mining and Bayesian estimation techniques, we apply a two-stage analysis approach in order to reveal relationships between various activity categories and the individual mood level. Our findings indicate that the mood level is influenced negatively when participants report about sickness or rumination. Social activities have a positive influence on the mood. By understanding the influences of daily activities on the individual mood level, we hope to improve the efficacy of online behavior therapy, provide support in the context of clinical decision-making, and contribute to the development of personalized interventions

    Text-based Sentiment Analysis and Music Emotion Recognition

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    Nowadays, with the expansion of social media, large amounts of user-generated texts like tweets, blog posts or product reviews are shared online. Sentiment polarity analysis of such texts has become highly attractive and is utilized in recommender systems, market predictions, business intelligence and more. We also witness deep learning techniques becoming top performers on those types of tasks. There are however several problems that need to be solved for efficient use of deep neural networks on text mining and text polarity analysis. First of all, deep neural networks are data hungry. They need to be fed with datasets that are big in size, cleaned and preprocessed as well as properly labeled. Second, the modern natural language processing concept of word embeddings as a dense and distributed text feature representation solves sparsity and dimensionality problems of the traditional bag-of-words model. Still, there are various uncertainties regarding the use of word vectors: should they be generated from the same dataset that is used to train the model or it is better to source them from big and popular collections that work as generic text feature representations? Third, it is not easy for practitioners to find a simple and highly effective deep learning setup for various document lengths and types. Recurrent neural networks are weak with longer texts and optimal convolution-pooling combinations are not easily conceived. It is thus convenient to have generic neural network architectures that are effective and can adapt to various texts, encapsulating much of design complexity. This thesis addresses the above problems to provide methodological and practical insights for utilizing neural networks on sentiment analysis of texts and achieving state of the art results. Regarding the first problem, the effectiveness of various crowdsourcing alternatives is explored and two medium-sized and emotion-labeled song datasets are created utilizing social tags. One of the research interests of Telecom Italia was the exploration of relations between music emotional stimulation and driving style. Consequently, a context-aware music recommender system that aims to enhance driving comfort and safety was also designed. To address the second problem, a series of experiments with large text collections of various contents and domains were conducted. Word embeddings of different parameters were exercised and results revealed that their quality is influenced (mostly but not only) by the size of texts they were created from. When working with small text datasets, it is thus important to source word features from popular and generic word embedding collections. Regarding the third problem, a series of experiments involving convolutional and max-pooling neural layers were conducted. Various patterns relating text properties and network parameters with optimal classification accuracy were observed. Combining convolutions of words, bigrams, and trigrams with regional max-pooling layers in a couple of stacks produced the best results. The derived architecture achieves competitive performance on sentiment polarity analysis of movie, business and product reviews. Given that labeled data are becoming the bottleneck of the current deep learning systems, a future research direction could be the exploration of various data programming possibilities for constructing even bigger labeled datasets. Investigation of feature-level or decision-level ensemble techniques in the context of deep neural networks could also be fruitful. Different feature types do usually represent complementary characteristics of data. Combining word embedding and traditional text features or utilizing recurrent networks on document splits and then aggregating the predictions could further increase prediction accuracy of such models

    Effectiveness of dismantling strategies on moderated vs. unmoderated online social platforms

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    Online social networks are the perfect test bed to better understand large-scale human behavior in interacting contexts. Although they are broadly used and studied, little is known about how their terms of service and posting rules affect the way users interact and information spreads. Acknowledging the relation between network connectivity and functionality, we compare the robustness of two different online social platforms, Twitter and Gab, with respect to dismantling strategies based on the recursive censor of users characterized by social prominence (degree) or intensity of inflammatory content (sentiment). We find that the moderated (Twitter) vs unmoderated (Gab) character of the network is not a discriminating factor for intervention effectiveness. We find, however, that more complex strategies based upon the combination of topological and content features may be effective for network dismantling. Our results provide useful indications to design better strategies for countervailing the production and dissemination of anti-social content in online social platforms

    Understanding Communication Patterns in MOOCs: Combining Data Mining and qualitative methods

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    Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer unprecedented opportunities to learn at scale. Within a few years, the phenomenon of crowd-based learning has gained enormous popularity with millions of learners across the globe participating in courses ranging from Popular Music to Astrophysics. They have captured the imaginations of many, attracting significant media attention - with The New York Times naming 2012 "The Year of the MOOC." For those engaged in learning analytics and educational data mining, MOOCs have provided an exciting opportunity to develop innovative methodologies that harness big data in education.Comment: Preprint of a chapter to appear in "Data Mining and Learning Analytics: Applications in Educational Research
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