Social Emotion Mining Techniques for Facebook Posts Reaction Prediction

As of February 2016 Facebook allows users to express their experienced emotions about a post by using five so-called `reactions'. This research paper proposes and evaluates alternative methods for predicting these reactions to user posts on public pages of firms/companies (like supermarket chains). For this purpose, we collected posts (and their reactions) from Facebook pages of large supermarket chains and constructed a dataset which is available for other researches. In order to predict the distribution of reactions of a new post, neural network architectures (convolutional and recurrent neural networks) were tested using pretrained word embeddings. Results of the neural networks were improved by introducing a bootstrapping approach for sentiment and emotion mining on the comments for each post. The final model (a combination of neural network and a baseline emotion miner) is able to predict the reaction distribution on Facebook posts with a mean squared error (or misclassification rate) of 0.135.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures and accepted at ICAART 2018. (Dataset: https://github.com/jerryspan/FacebookR

Método semi-supervisado para detectar, clasificar y anotar en un corpus de suicidio textos extraídos de entornos digitales

La presente tesis doctoral, con un enfoque cualicuantitativo (mixto), se enmarca en la línea del análisis de sentimientos en redes sociales, forma parte del proyecto Life, que busca crear una plataforma integral para detectar y brindar apoyo especializado a usuarios de redes sociales que publican textos con contenido suicida. Por ello se desarrolló el Corpus Life para realizar experimentos con algoritmos de aprendizaje automático, mismo que originalmente constaba de 102 mensajes suicidas (71 textos en inglés y 31 textos en español), 70 de estas muestras Sin Riesgo y 32 con Riesgo. Pero debido al escaso número de muestras y al desbalance entre ellas, los resultados generados no eran confiables. Por ello esta investigación tuvo como objetivo general desarrollar un método semi-supervisado para detectar, clasificar y anotar en el Corpus Life, textos extraídos de entornos digitales, con el fin de incrementar su número de anotaciones, mediante un proceso de evaluación automática de su calidad, previo a su inclusión o exclusión. Anotaciones que fueron evaluadas manualmente, utilizando para ello la medida de concordancia Cohen´s Kappa, con la participación de anotadores especializados quienes evaluaron los textos, alcanzando un nivel de acuerdo entre anotadores de 0,86, cercano al 0,78-0,81 de significancia estadística alcanzado automáticamente por medio del índice macro f1, con el método semi-supervisado. Lo que conllevo a alcanzar experimentos de un mayor grado de confiabilidad, por medio de un método estructurado con actividades, roles y procesos bien definidos y enlazados.This doctoral thesis with a qualitative-quantitative (mixed) approach is part of the analysis of feelings in social networks that publish texts with suicidal content. For this reason, Corpus life was developed to carry out experiments with machine learning algorithms, which originally consisted of 102 suicide messages (71 texts in English and 31 texts in Spanish), 70 of these samples without risk and 32 with risk. But due to the small number of samples and the imbalance between them, the generated outcome was not reliable. Therefore, this research had the general objective of developing a semi-supervised method to detect, classify and annotate in the Corpus Life, texts extracted from digital environments, in order to increase their number of annotations, through a process of automatic assessments of their quality, prior to their inclusion or exclusion. Records which were tested manually, using the Cohen's Kappa concordance measure, with the participation of specialized annotators who evaluated the texts, reaching a level of agreement between annotators of 0.86, close to 0.78-0.81 of statistically significant reaching automatically by means of the f1 macro index, with the semi-supervised method. This led to achieving experiments with a higher degree of reliability, through a structured method with well-defined and linked activities, roles and processes

Exploiting a bootstrapping approach for automatic annotation of emotions in texts

The objective of this research is to develop a technique to automatically annotate emotional corpora. The complexity of automatic annotation of emotional corpora still presents numerous challenges and thus there is a need to develop a technique that allow us to tackle the annotation task. The relevance of this research is demonstrated by the fact that people's emotions and the patterns of these emotions provide a great value for business, individuals, society or politics. Hence, the creation of a robust emotion detection system becomes crucial. Due to the subjectivity of the emotions, the main challenge for the creation of emotional resources is the annotation process. Thus, with this staring point in mind, the objective of our paper is to illustrate an innovative and effective bootstrapping process for automatic annotations of emotional corpora. The evaluations carried out confirm the soundness of the proposed approach and allow us to consider the bootstrapping process as an appropriate approach to create resources such as an emotional corpus that can be employed on supervised machine learning towards the improvement of emotion detection systems