Scalable Privacy-Compliant Virality Prediction on Twitter

The digital town hall of Twitter becomes a preferred medium of communication for individuals and organizations across the globe. Some of them reach audiences of millions, while others struggle to get noticed. Given the impact of social media, the question remains more relevant than ever: how to model the dynamics of attention in Twitter. Researchers around the world turn to machine learning to predict the most influential tweets and authors, navigating the volume, velocity, and variety of social big data, with many compromises. In this paper, we revisit content popularity prediction on Twitter. We argue that strict alignment of data acquisition, storage and analysis algorithms is necessary to avoid the common trade-offs between scalability, accuracy and privacy compliance. We propose a new framework for the rapid acquisition of large-scale datasets, high accuracy supervisory signal and multilanguage sentiment prediction while respecting every privacy request applicable. We then apply a novel gradient boosting framework to achieve state-of-the-art results in virality ranking, already before including tweet's visual or propagation features. Our Gradient Boosted Regression Tree is the first to offer explainable, strong ranking performance on benchmark datasets. Since the analysis focused on features available early, the model is immediately applicable to incoming tweets in 18 languages.Comment: AffCon@AAAI-19 Best Paper Award; Presented at AAAI-19 W1: Affective Content Analysi

Automatically Quantifying Customer Need Tweets: Towards a Supervised Machine Learning Approach

The elicitation of customer needs is an important task for businesses in order to design customer-centric products and services. While there are different approaches available, most lack automation, scalability and monitoring capabilities. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility to automatically identify and quantify customer needs by training and evaluating on previously-labeled Twitter data. To achieve that, we utilize a supervised machine learning approach. Our results show that the classification performances are statistically superior-”but can be further improved in the future

Sentiment analysis and real-time microblog search

This thesis sets out to examine the role played by sentiment in real-time microblog search. The recent prominence of the real-time web is proving both challenging and disruptive for a number of areas of research, notably information retrieval and web data mining. User-generated content on the real-time web is perhaps best epitomised by content on microblogging platforms, such as Twitter. Given the substantial quantity of microblog posts that may be relevant to a user query at a given point in time, automated methods are required to enable users to sift through this information. As an area of research reaching maturity, sentiment analysis offers a promising direction for modelling the text content in microblog streams. In this thesis we review the real-time web as a new area of focus for sentiment analysis, with a specific focus on microblogging. We propose a system and method for evaluating the effect of sentiment on perceived search quality in real-time microblog search scenarios. Initially we provide an evaluation of sentiment analysis using supervised learning for classi- fying the short, informal content in microblog posts. We then evaluate our sentiment-based filtering system for microblog search in a user study with simulated real-time scenarios. Lastly, we conduct real-time user studies for the live broadcast of the popular television programme, the X Factor, and for the Leaders Debate during the Irish General Election. We find that we are able to satisfactorily classify positive, negative and neutral sentiment in microblog posts. We also find a significant role played by sentiment in many microblog search scenarios, observing some detrimental effects in filtering out certain sentiment types. We make a series of observations regarding associations between document-level sentiment and user feedback, including associations with user profile attributes, and users’ prior topic sentiment

Arabic sentence-level sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis has recently become one of the growing areas of research related to text mining and natural language processing. The increasing availability of online resources and popularity of rich and fast resources for opinion sharing like news, online review sites and personal blogs, caused several parties such as customers, companies, and governments to start analyzing and exploring these opinions. The main task of sentiment classification is to classify a sentence (i.e. review, blog, comment, news, etc.) as holding an overall positive, negative or neutral sentiment. Most of the current studies related to this topic focus mainly on English texts with very limited resources available for other languages like Arabic, especially for the Egyptian dialect. In this research work, we would like to improve the performance measures of Egyptian dialect sentence-level sentiment analysis by proposing a hybrid approach which combines both the machine learning approach using support vector machines and the semantic orientation approach. Two methodologies were proposed, one for each approach, which were then joined, creating the hybrid proposed approach. The corpus used contains more than 20,000 Egyptian dialect tweets collected from Twitter, from which 4800 manually annotated tweets will be used (1600 positive tweets, 1600 negative tweets and 1600 neutral tweets). We performed several experiments to: 1) compare the results of each approach individually with regards to our case which is dealing with the Egyptian dialect before and after preprocessing; 2) compare the performance of merging both approaches together generating the hybrid approach against the performance of each approach separately; and 3) evaluate the effectiveness of considering negation on the performance of the hybrid approach. The results obtained show significant improvements in terms of the accuracy, precision, recall and F-measure, indicating that our proposed hybrid approach is effective in sentence-level sentiment classification. Also, the results are very promising which encourages continuing in this line of research

Clasificación de sentimientos semi-supervisada y dependiente de objetivo para micro- blogs

The wealth of opinions expressed in micro-blogs, such as tweets, motivated researchers to develop techniques for automatic opinion detection. However, accuracies of such techniques are still limited. Moreover, current techniques focus on detecting sentiment polarity regardless of the topic (target) discussed. Detecting sentiment towards a specific target, referred to as target-dependent sentiment classification, has not received adequate researchers’ attention. Literature review has shown that all target-dependent approaches use supervised learning techniques. Such techniques need a large number of labeled data. However, labeling data in social media is cumbersome and error prone. The research presented in this paper addresses this issue by employing semi-supervised learning techniques for target-dependent sentiment classification. Semisupervised learning techniques make use of labeled as well as unlabeled data. In this paper, we present a new semi-supervised learning technique that uses less number of labeled micro-blogs than that used by supervised learning techniques. Experiment results have shown that the proposed technique provides comparable accuracy.Facultad de Informátic

Exploring Latent Semantic Information for Textual Emotion Recognition in Blog Articles

Understanding people's emotions through natural language is a challenging task for intelligent systems based on Internet of Things (IoT). The major difficulty is caused by the lack of basic knowledge in emotion expressions with respect to a variety of real world contexts. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian inference method to explore the latent semantic dimensions as contextual information in natural language and to learn the knowledge of emotion expressions based on these semantic dimensions. Our method synchronously infers the latent semantic dimensions as topics in words and predicts the emotion labels in both word-level and document-level texts. The Bayesian inference results enable us to visualize the connection between words and emotions with respect to different semantic dimensions. And by further incorporating a corpus-level hierarchy in the document emotion distribution assumption, we could balance the document emotion recognition results and achieve even better word and document emotion predictions. Our experiment of the word-level and the document-level emotion predictions, based on a well-developed Chinese emotion corpus Ren-CECps, renders both higher accuracy and better robustness in the word-level and the document-level emotion predictions compared to the state-of-the-art emotion prediction algorithms