Domain knowledge, uncertainty, and parameter constraints

Ph.D.Committee Chair: Guy Lebanon; Committee Member: Alex Shapiro; Committee Member: Alexander Gray; Committee Member: Chin-Hui Lee; Committee Member: Hongyuan Zh

Statistical and Computational Tradeoffs in Stochastic Composite Likelihood

Maximum likelihood estimators are often of limited practical use due to the intensive computation they require. We propose a family of alternative estimators that maximize a stochastic variation of the composite likelihood function. Each of the estimators resolve the computation-accuracy tradeoff differently, and taken together they span a continuous spectrum of computation-accuracy tradeoff resolutions. We prove the consistency of the estimators, provide formulas for their asymptotic variance, statistical robustness, and computational complexity. We discuss experimental results in the context of Boltzmann machines and conditional random fields. The theoretical and experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the estimators when the computational resources are insufficient. They also demonstrate that in some cases reduced computational complexity is associated with robustness thereby increasing statistical accuracy.Comment: 30 pages, 97 figures, 2 author

Dynamic joint sentiment-topic model

Social media data are produced continuously by a large and uncontrolled number of users. The dynamic nature of such data requires the sentiment and topic analysis model to be also dynamically updated, capturing the most recent language use of sentiments and topics in text. We propose a dynamic joint sentiment-topic model (dJST) which allows the detection and tracking of views of current and recurrent interests and shifts in topic and sentiment. Both topic and sentiment dynamics are captured by assuming that the current sentiment-topic specific word distributions are generated according to the word distributions at previous epochs. We study three different ways of accounting for such dependency information, (1) Sliding window where the current sentiment-topic-word distributions are dependent on the previous sentiment-topic specific word distributions in the last S epochs; (2) Skip model where history sentiment-topic-word distributions are considered by skipping some epochs in between; and (3) Multiscale model where previous long- and shorttimescale distributions are taken into consideration. We derive efficient online inference procedures to sequentially update the model with newly arrived data and show the effectiveness of our proposed model on the Mozilla add-on reviews crawled between 2007 and 2011

New features for sentiment analysis: Do sentences matter?

1st International Workshop on Sentiment Discovery from Affective Data 2012, SDAD 2012 - In Conjunction with ECML-PKDD 2012; Bristol; United Kingdom; 28 September 2012 through 28 September 2012In this work, we propose and evaluate new features to be used in a word polarity based approach to sentiment classification. In particular, we analyze sentences as the first step before estimating the overall review polarity. We consider different aspects of sentences, such as length, purity, irrealis content, subjectivity, and position within the opinionated text. This analysis is then used to find sentences that may convey better information about the overall review polarity. The TripAdvisor dataset is used to evaluate the effect of sentence level features on polarity classification. Our initial results indicate a small improvement in classification accuracy when using the newly proposed features. However, the benefit of these features is not limited to improving sentiment classification accuracy since sentence level features can be used for other important tasks such as review summarization.European Commission, FP7, under UBIPOL (Ubiquitous Participation Platform for Policy Making) Projec

Document-level sentiment analysis of email data

Sisi Liu investigated machine learning methods for Email document sentiment analysis. She developed a systematic framework that has been qualitatively and quantitatively proved to be effective and efficient in identifying sentiment from massive amount of Email data. Analytical results obtained from the document-level Email sentiment analysis framework are beneficial for better decision making in various business settings