Political Depolarization of News Articles Using Attribute-aware Word Embeddings

Political polarization in the US is on the rise. This polarization negatively affects the public sphere by contributing to the creation of ideological echo chambers. In this paper, we focus on addressing one of the factors that contributes to this polarity, polarized media. We introduce a framework for depolarizing news articles. Given an article on a certain topic with a particular ideological slant (eg., liberal or conservative), the framework first detects polar language in the article and then generates a new article with the polar language replaced with neutral expressions. To detect polar words, we train a multi-attribute-aware word embedding model that is aware of ideology and topics on 360k full-length media articles. Then, for text generation, we propose a new algorithm called Text Annealing Depolarization Algorithm (TADA). TADA retrieves neutral expressions from the word embedding model that not only decrease ideological polarity but also preserve the original argument of the text, while maintaining grammatical correctness. We evaluate our framework by comparing the depolarized output of our model in two modes, fully-automatic and semi-automatic, on 99 stories spanning 11 topics. Based on feedback from 161 human testers, our framework successfully depolarized 90.1% of paragraphs in semi-automatic mode and 78.3% of paragraphs in fully-automatic mode. Furthermore, 81.2% of the testers agree that the non-polar content information is well-preserved and 79% agree that depolarization does not harm semantic correctness when they compare the original text and the depolarized text. Our work shows that data-driven methods can help to locate political polarity and aid in the depolarization of articles.Comment: In Proceedings of the 15th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2021

Attention-based Approaches for Text Analytics in Social Media and Automatic Summarization

[ES] Hoy en día, la sociedad tiene acceso y posibilidad de contribuir a grandes cantidades de contenidos presentes en Internet, como redes sociales, periódicos online, foros, blogs o plataformas de contenido multimedia. Todo este tipo de medios han tenido, durante los últimos años, un impacto abrumador en el día a día de individuos y organizaciones, siendo actualmente medios predominantes para compartir, debatir y analizar contenidos online. Por este motivo, resulta de interés trabajar sobre este tipo de plataformas, desde diferentes puntos de vista, bajo el paraguas del Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. En esta tesis nos centramos en dos áreas amplias dentro de este campo, aplicadas al análisis de contenido en línea: análisis de texto en redes sociales y resumen automático. En paralelo, las redes neuronales también son un tema central de esta tesis, donde toda la experimentación se ha realizado utilizando enfoques de aprendizaje profundo, principalmente basados en mecanismos de atención. Además, trabajamos mayoritariamente con el idioma español, por ser un idioma poco explorado y de gran interés para los proyectos de investigación en los que participamos. Por un lado, para el análisis de texto en redes sociales, nos enfocamos en tareas de análisis afectivo, incluyendo análisis de sentimientos y detección de emociones, junto con el análisis de la ironía. En este sentido, se presenta un enfoque basado en Transformer Encoders, que consiste en contextualizar \textit{word embeddings} pre-entrenados con tweets en español, para abordar tareas de análisis de sentimiento y detección de ironía. También proponemos el uso de métricas de evaluación como funciones de pérdida, con el fin de entrenar redes neuronales, para reducir el impacto del desequilibrio de clases en tareas \textit{multi-class} y \textit{multi-label} de detección de emociones. Adicionalmente, se presenta una especialización de BERT tanto para el idioma español como para el dominio de Twitter, que tiene en cuenta la coherencia entre tweets en conversaciones de Twitter. El desempeño de todos estos enfoques ha sido probado con diferentes corpus, a partir de varios \textit{benchmarks} de referencia, mostrando resultados muy competitivos en todas las tareas abordadas. Por otro lado, nos centramos en el resumen extractivo de artículos periodísticos y de programas televisivos de debate. Con respecto al resumen de artículos, se presenta un marco teórico para el resumen extractivo, basado en redes jerárquicas siamesas con mecanismos de atención. También presentamos dos instancias de este marco: \textit{Siamese Hierarchical Attention Networks} y \textit{Siamese Hierarchical Transformer Encoders}. Estos sistemas han sido evaluados en los corpora CNN/DailyMail y NewsRoom, obteniendo resultados competitivos en comparación con otros enfoques extractivos coetáneos. Con respecto a los programas de debate, se ha propuesto una tarea que consiste en resumir las intervenciones transcritas de los ponentes, sobre un tema determinado, en el programa "La Noche en 24 Horas". Además, se propone un corpus de artículos periodísticos, recogidos de varios periódicos españoles en línea, con el fin de estudiar la transferibilidad de los enfoques propuestos, entre artículos e intervenciones de los participantes en los debates. Este enfoque muestra mejores resultados que otras técnicas extractivas, junto con una transferibilidad de dominio muy prometedora.[CA] Avui en dia, la societat té accés i possibilitat de contribuir a grans quantitats de continguts presents a Internet, com xarxes socials, diaris online, fòrums, blocs o plataformes de contingut multimèdia. Tot aquest tipus de mitjans han tingut, durant els darrers anys, un impacte aclaparador en el dia a dia d'individus i organitzacions, sent actualment mitjans predominants per compartir, debatre i analitzar continguts en línia. Per aquest motiu, resulta d'interès treballar sobre aquest tipus de plataformes, des de diferents punts de vista, sota el paraigua de l'Processament de el Llenguatge Natural. En aquesta tesi ens centrem en dues àrees àmplies dins d'aquest camp, aplicades a l'anàlisi de contingut en línia: anàlisi de text en xarxes socials i resum automàtic. En paral·lel, les xarxes neuronals també són un tema central d'aquesta tesi, on tota l'experimentació s'ha realitzat utilitzant enfocaments d'aprenentatge profund, principalment basats en mecanismes d'atenció. A més, treballem majoritàriament amb l'idioma espanyol, per ser un idioma poc explorat i de gran interès per als projectes de recerca en els que participem. D'una banda, per a l'anàlisi de text en xarxes socials, ens enfoquem en tasques d'anàlisi afectiu, incloent anàlisi de sentiments i detecció d'emocions, juntament amb l'anàlisi de la ironia. En aquest sentit, es presenta una aproximació basada en Transformer Encoders, que consisteix en contextualitzar \textit{word embeddings} pre-entrenats amb tweets en espanyol, per abordar tasques d'anàlisi de sentiment i detecció d'ironia. També proposem l'ús de mètriques d'avaluació com a funcions de pèrdua, per tal d'entrenar xarxes neuronals, per reduir l'impacte de l'desequilibri de classes en tasques \textit{multi-class} i \textit{multi-label} de detecció d'emocions. Addicionalment, es presenta una especialització de BERT tant per l'idioma espanyol com per al domini de Twitter, que té en compte la coherència entre tweets en converses de Twitter. El comportament de tots aquests enfocaments s'ha provat amb diferents corpus, a partir de diversos \textit{benchmarks} de referència, mostrant resultats molt competitius en totes les tasques abordades. D'altra banda, ens centrem en el resum extractiu d'articles periodístics i de programes televisius de debat. Pel que fa a l'resum d'articles, es presenta un marc teòric per al resum extractiu, basat en xarxes jeràrquiques siameses amb mecanismes d'atenció. També presentem dues instàncies d'aquest marc: \textit{Siamese Hierarchical Attention Networks} i \textit{Siamese Hierarchical Transformer Encoders}. Aquests sistemes s'han avaluat en els corpora CNN/DailyMail i Newsroom, obtenint resultats competitius en comparació amb altres enfocaments extractius coetanis. Pel que fa als programes de debat, s'ha proposat una tasca que consisteix a resumir les intervencions transcrites dels ponents, sobre un tema determinat, al programa "La Noche en 24 Horas". A més, es proposa un corpus d'articles periodístics, recollits de diversos diaris espanyols en línia, per tal d'estudiar la transferibilitat dels enfocaments proposats, entre articles i intervencions dels participants en els debats. Aquesta aproximació mostra millors resultats que altres tècniques extractives, juntament amb una transferibilitat de domini molt prometedora.[EN] Nowadays, society has access, and the possibility to contribute, to large amounts of the content present on the internet, such as social networks, online newspapers, forums, blogs, or multimedia content platforms. These platforms have had, during the last years, an overwhelming impact on the daily life of individuals and organizations, becoming the predominant ways for sharing, discussing, and analyzing online content. Therefore, it is very interesting to work with these platforms, from different points of view, under the umbrella of Natural Language Processing. In this thesis, we focus on two broad areas inside this field, applied to analyze online content: text analytics in social media and automatic summarization. Neural networks are also a central topic in this thesis, where all the experimentation has been performed by using deep learning approaches, mainly based on attention mechanisms. Besides, we mostly work with the Spanish language, due to it is an interesting and underexplored language with a great interest in the research projects we participated in. On the one hand, for text analytics in social media, we focused on affective analysis tasks, including sentiment analysis and emotion detection, along with the analysis of the irony. In this regard, an approach based on Transformer Encoders, based on contextualizing pretrained Spanish word embeddings from Twitter, to address sentiment analysis and irony detection tasks, is presented. We also propose the use of evaluation metrics as loss functions, in order to train neural networks for reducing the impact of the class imbalance in multi-class and multi-label emotion detection tasks. Additionally, a specialization of BERT both for the Spanish language and the Twitter domain, that takes into account inter-sentence coherence in Twitter conversation flows, is presented. The performance of all these approaches has been tested with different corpora, from several reference evaluation benchmarks, showing very competitive results in all the tasks addressed. On the other hand, we focused on extractive summarization of news articles and TV talk shows. Regarding the summarization of news articles, a theoretical framework for extractive summarization, based on siamese hierarchical networks with attention mechanisms, is presented. Also, we present two instantiations of this framework: Siamese Hierarchical Attention Networks and Siamese Hierarchical Transformer Encoders. These systems were evaluated on the CNN/DailyMail and the NewsRoom corpora, obtaining competitive results in comparison to other contemporary extractive approaches. Concerning the TV talk shows, we proposed a text summarization task, for summarizing the transcribed interventions of the speakers, about a given topic, in the Spanish TV talk shows of the ``La Noche en 24 Horas" program. In addition, a corpus of news articles, collected from several Spanish online newspapers, is proposed, in order to study the domain transferability of siamese hierarchical approaches, between news articles and interventions of debate participants. This approach shows better results than other extractive techniques, along with a very promising domain transferability.González Barba, JÁ. (2021). Attention-based Approaches for Text Analytics in Social Media and Automatic Summarization [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/172245TESI

A Survey on Semantic Processing Techniques

Semantic processing is a fundamental research domain in computational linguistics. In the era of powerful pre-trained language models and large language models, the advancement of research in this domain appears to be decelerating. However, the study of semantics is multi-dimensional in linguistics. The research depth and breadth of computational semantic processing can be largely improved with new technologies. In this survey, we analyzed five semantic processing tasks, e.g., word sense disambiguation, anaphora resolution, named entity recognition, concept extraction, and subjectivity detection. We study relevant theoretical research in these fields, advanced methods, and downstream applications. We connect the surveyed tasks with downstream applications because this may inspire future scholars to fuse these low-level semantic processing tasks with high-level natural language processing tasks. The review of theoretical research may also inspire new tasks and technologies in the semantic processing domain. Finally, we compare the different semantic processing techniques and summarize their technical trends, application trends, and future directions.Comment: Published at Information Fusion, Volume 101, 2024, 101988, ISSN 1566-2535. The equal contribution mark is missed in the published version due to the publication policies. Please contact Prof. Erik Cambria for detail

Multilingual sentiment analysis in social media.

252 p.This thesis addresses the task of analysing sentiment in messages coming from social media. The ultimate goal was to develop a Sentiment Analysis system for Basque. However, because of the socio-linguistic reality of the Basque language a tool providing only analysis for Basque would not be enough for a real world application. Thus, we set out to develop a multilingual system, including Basque, English, French and Spanish.The thesis addresses the following challenges to build such a system:- Analysing methods for creating Sentiment lexicons, suitable for less resourced languages.- Analysis of social media (specifically Twitter): Tweets pose several challenges in order to understand and extract opinions from such messages. Language identification and microtext normalization are addressed.- Research the state of the art in polarity classification, and develop a supervised classifier that is tested against well known social media benchmarks.- Develop a social media monitor capable of analysing sentiment with respect to specific events, products or organizations

Multilingual sentiment analysis in social media.

252 p.This thesis addresses the task of analysing sentiment in messages coming from social media. The ultimate goal was to develop a Sentiment Analysis system for Basque. However, because of the socio-linguistic reality of the Basque language a tool providing only analysis for Basque would not be enough for a real world application. Thus, we set out to develop a multilingual system, including Basque, English, French and Spanish.The thesis addresses the following challenges to build such a system:- Analysing methods for creating Sentiment lexicons, suitable for less resourced languages.- Analysis of social media (specifically Twitter): Tweets pose several challenges in order to understand and extract opinions from such messages. Language identification and microtext normalization are addressed.- Research the state of the art in polarity classification, and develop a supervised classifier that is tested against well known social media benchmarks.- Develop a social media monitor capable of analysing sentiment with respect to specific events, products or organizations

Natural Language Processing using Deep Learning in Social Media

[ES] En los últimos años, los modelos de aprendizaje automático profundo (AP) han revolucionado los sistemas de procesamiento de lenguaje natural (PLN). Hemos sido testigos de un avance formidable en las capacidades de estos sistemas y actualmente podemos encontrar sistemas que integran modelos PLN de manera ubicua. Algunos ejemplos de estos modelos con los que interaccionamos a diario incluyen modelos que determinan la intención de la persona que escribió un texto, el sentimiento que pretende comunicar un tweet o nuestra ideología política a partir de lo que compartimos en redes sociales. En esta tesis se han propuestos distintos modelos de PNL que abordan tareas que estudian el texto que se comparte en redes sociales. En concreto, este trabajo se centra en dos tareas fundamentalmente: el análisis de sentimientos y el reconocimiento de la personalidad de la persona autora de un texto. La tarea de analizar el sentimiento expresado en un texto es uno de los problemas principales en el PNL y consiste en determinar la polaridad que un texto pretende comunicar. Se trata por lo tanto de una tarea estudiada en profundidad de la cual disponemos de una vasta cantidad de recursos y modelos. Por el contrario, el problema del reconocimiento de personalidad es una tarea revolucionaria que tiene como objetivo determinar la personalidad de los usuarios considerando su estilo de escritura. El estudio de esta tarea es más marginal por lo que disponemos de menos recursos para abordarla pero que no obstante presenta un gran potencial. A pesar de que el enfoque principal de este trabajo fue el desarrollo de modelos de aprendizaje profundo, también hemos propuesto modelos basados en recursos lingüísticos y modelos clásicos del aprendizaje automático. Estos últimos modelos nos han permitido explorar las sutilezas de distintos elementos lingüísticos como por ejemplo el impacto que tienen las emociones en la clasificación correcta del sentimiento expresado en un texto. Posteriormente, tras estos trabajos iniciales se desarrollaron modelos AP, en particular, Redes neuronales convolucionales (RNC) que fueron aplicadas a las tareas previamente citadas. En el caso del reconocimiento de la personalidad, se han comparado modelos clásicos del aprendizaje automático con modelos de aprendizaje profundo, pudiendo establecer una comparativa bajo las mismas premisas. Cabe destacar que el PNL ha evolucionado drásticamente en los últimos años gracias al desarrollo de campañas de evaluación pública, donde múltiples equipos de investigación comparan las capacidades de los modelos que proponen en las mismas condiciones. La mayoría de los modelos presentados en esta tesis fueron o bien evaluados mediante campañas de evaluación públicas, o bien emplearon la configuración de una campaña pública previamente celebrada. Siendo conscientes, por lo tanto, de la importancia de estas campañas para el avance del PNL, desarrollamos una campaña de evaluación pública cuyo objetivo era clasificar el tema tratado en un tweet, para lo cual recogimos y etiquetamos un nuevo conjunto de datos. A medida que avanzabamos en el desarrollo del trabajo de esta tesis, decidimos estudiar en profundidad como las RNC se aplicaban a las tareas de PNL. En este sentido, se exploraron dos líneas de trabajo. En primer lugar, propusimos un método de relleno semántico para RNC, que plantea una nueva manera de representar el texto para resolver tareas de PNL. Y en segundo lugar, se introdujo un marco teórico para abordar una de las críticas más frecuentes del aprendizaje profundo, el cual es la falta de interpretabilidad. Este marco busca visualizar qué patrones léxicos, si los hay, han sido aprendidos por la red para clasificar un texto.[CA] En els últims anys, els models d'aprenentatge automàtic profund (AP) han revolucionat els sistemes de processament de llenguatge natural (PLN). Hem estat testimonis d'un avanç formidable en les capacitats d'aquests sistemes i actualment podem trobar sistemes que integren models PLN de manera ubiqua. Alguns exemples d'aquests models amb els quals interaccionem diàriament inclouen models que determinen la intenció de la persona que va escriure un text, el sentiment que pretén comunicar un tweet o la nostra ideologia política a partir del que compartim en xarxes socials. En aquesta tesi s'han proposats diferents models de PNL que aborden tasques que estudien el text que es comparteix en xarxes socials. En concret, aquest treball se centra en dues tasques fonamentalment: l'anàlisi de sentiments i el reconeixement de la personalitat de la persona autora d'un text. La tasca d'analitzar el sentiment expressat en un text és un dels problemes principals en el PNL i consisteix a determinar la polaritat que un text pretén comunicar. Es tracta per tant d'una tasca estudiada en profunditat de la qual disposem d'una vasta quantitat de recursos i models. Per contra, el problema del reconeixement de la personalitat és una tasca revolucionària que té com a objectiu determinar la personalitat dels usuaris considerant el seu estil d'escriptura. L'estudi d'aquesta tasca és més marginal i en conseqüència disposem de menys recursos per abordar-la però no obstant i això presenta un gran potencial. Tot i que el fouc principal d'aquest treball va ser el desenvolupament de models d'aprenentatge profund, també hem proposat models basats en recursos lingüístics i models clàssics de l'aprenentatge automàtic. Aquests últims models ens han permès explorar les subtileses de diferents elements lingüístics com ara l'impacte que tenen les emocions en la classificació correcta del sentiment expressat en un text. Posteriorment, després d'aquests treballs inicials es van desenvolupar models AP, en particular, Xarxes neuronals convolucionals (XNC) que van ser aplicades a les tasques prèviament esmentades. En el cas de el reconeixement de la personalitat, s'han comparat models clàssics de l'aprenentatge automàtic amb models d'aprenentatge profund la qual cosa a permet establir una comparativa de les dos aproximacions sota les mateixes premisses. Cal remarcar que el PNL ha evolucionat dràsticament en els últims anys gràcies a el desenvolupament de campanyes d'avaluació pública on múltiples equips d'investigació comparen les capacitats dels models que proposen sota les mateixes condicions. La majoria dels models presentats en aquesta tesi van ser o bé avaluats mitjançant campanyes d'avaluació públiques, o bé s'ha emprat la configuració d'una campanya pública prèviament celebrada. Sent conscients, per tant, de la importància d'aquestes campanyes per a l'avanç del PNL, vam desenvolupar una campanya d'avaluació pública on l'objectiu era classificar el tema tractat en un tweet, per a la qual cosa vam recollir i etiquetar un nou conjunt de dades. A mesura que avançàvem en el desenvolupament del treball d'aquesta tesi, vam decidir estudiar en profunditat com les XNC s'apliquen a les tasques de PNL. En aquest sentit, es van explorar dues línies de treball.En primer lloc, vam proposar un mètode d'emplenament semàntic per RNC, que planteja una nova manera de representar el text per resoldre tasques de PNL. I en segon lloc, es va introduir un marc teòric per abordar una de les crítiques més freqüents de l'aprenentatge profund, el qual és la falta de interpretabilitat. Aquest marc cerca visualitzar quins patrons lèxics, si n'hi han, han estat apresos per la xarxa per classificar un text.[EN] In the last years, Deep Learning (DL) has revolutionised the potential of automatic systems that handle Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. We have witnessed a tremendous advance in the performance of these systems. Nowadays, we found embedded systems ubiquitously, determining the intent of the text we write, the sentiment of our tweets or our political views, for citing some examples. In this thesis, we proposed several NLP models for addressing tasks that deal with social media text. Concretely, this work is focused mainly on Sentiment Analysis and Personality Recognition tasks. Sentiment Analysis is one of the leading problems in NLP, consists of determining the polarity of a text, and it is a well-known task where the number of resources and models proposed is vast. In contrast, Personality Recognition is a breakthrough task that aims to determine the users' personality using their writing style, but it is more a niche task with fewer resources designed ad-hoc but with great potential. Despite the fact that the principal focus of this work was on the development of Deep Learning models, we have also proposed models based on linguistic resources and classical Machine Learning models. Moreover, in this more straightforward setup, we have explored the nuances of different language devices, such as the impact of emotions in the correct classification of the sentiment expressed in a text. Afterwards, DL models were developed, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), to address previously described tasks. In the case of Personality Recognition, we explored the two approaches, which allowed us to compare the models under the same circumstances. Noteworthy, NLP has evolved dramatically in the last years through the development of public evaluation campaigns, where multiple research teams compare the performance of their approaches under the same conditions. Most of the models here presented were either assessed in an evaluation task or either used their setup. Recognising the importance of this effort, we curated and developed an evaluation campaign for classifying political tweets. In addition, as we advanced in the development of this work, we decided to study in-depth CNNs applied to NLP tasks. Two lines of work were explored in this regard. Firstly, we proposed a semantic-based padding method for CNNs, which addresses how to represent text more appropriately for solving NLP tasks. Secondly, a theoretical framework was introduced for tackling one of the most frequent critics of Deep Learning: interpretability. This framework seeks to visualise what lexical patterns, if any, the CNN is learning in order to classify a sentence. In summary, the main achievements presented in this thesis are: - The organisation of an evaluation campaign for Topic Classification from texts gathered from social media. - The proposal of several Machine Learning models tackling the Sentiment Analysis task from social media. Besides, a study of the impact of linguistic devices such as figurative language in the task is presented. - The development of a model for inferring the personality of a developer provided the source code that they have written. - The study of Personality Recognition tasks from social media following two different approaches, models based on machine learning algorithms and handcrafted features, and models based on CNNs were proposed and compared both approaches. - The introduction of new semantic-based paddings for optimising how the text was represented in CNNs. - The definition of a theoretical framework to provide interpretable information to what CNNs were learning internally.Giménez Fayos, MT. (2021). Natural Language Processing using Deep Learning in Social Media [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/172164TESI

FINE-GRAINED EMOTION DETECTION IN MICROBLOG TEXT

Automatic emotion detection in text is concerned with using natural language processing techniques to recognize emotions expressed in written discourse. Endowing computers with the ability to recognize emotions in a particular kind of text, microblogs, has important applications in sentiment analysis and affective computing. In order to build computational models that can recognize the emotions represented in tweets we need to identify a set of suitable emotion categories. Prior work has mainly focused on building computational models for only a small set of six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise). This thesis describes a taxonomy of 28 emotion categories, an expansion of these six basic emotions, developed inductively from data. This set of 28 emotion categories represents a set of fine-grained emotion categories that are representative of the range of emotions expressed in tweets, microblog posts on Twitter. The ability of humans to recognize these fine-grained emotion categories is characterized using inter-annotator reliability measures based on annotations provided by expert and novice annotators. A set of 15,553 human-annotated tweets form a gold standard corpus, EmoTweet-28. For each emotion category, we have extracted a set of linguistic cues (i.e., punctuation marks, emoticons, emojis, abbreviated forms, interjections, lemmas, hashtags and collocations) that can serve as salient indicators for that emotion category. We evaluated the performance of automatic classification techniques on the set of 28 emotion categories through a series of experiments using several classifier and feature combinations. Our results shows that it is feasible to extend machine learning classification to fine-grained emotion detection in tweets (i.e., as many as 28 emotion categories) with results that are comparable to state-of-the-art classifiers that detect six to eight basic emotions in text. Classifiers using features extracted from the linguistic cues associated with each category equal or better the performance of conventional corpus-based and lexicon-based features for fine-grained emotion classification. This thesis makes an important theoretical contribution in the development of a taxonomy of emotion in text. In addition, this research also makes several practical contributions, particularly in the creation of language resources (i.e., corpus and lexicon) and machine learning models for fine-grained emotion detection in text

Multilingual opinion mining

170 p.Cada día se genera gran cantidad de texto en diferentes medios online. Gran parte de ese texto contiene opiniones acerca de multitud de entidades, productos, servicios, etc. Dada la creciente necesidad de disponer de medios automatizados para analizar, procesar y explotar esa información, las técnicas de análisis de sentimiento han recibido gran cantidad de atención por parte de la industria y la comunidad científica durante la última década y media. No obstante, muchas de las técnicas empleadas suelen requerir de entrenamiento supervisado utilizando para ello ejemplos anotados manualmente, u otros recursos lingüísticos relacionados con un idioma o dominio de aplicación específicos. Esto limita la aplicación de este tipo de técnicas, ya que dicho recursos y ejemplos anotados no son sencillos de obtener. En esta tesis se explora una serie de métodos para realizar diversos análisis automáticos de texto en el marco del análisis de sentimiento, incluyendo la obtención automática de términos de un dominio, palabras que expresan opinión, polaridad del sentimiento de dichas palabras (positivas o negativas), etc. Finalmente se propone y se evalúa un método que combina representación continua de palabras (continuous word embeddings) y topic-modelling inspirado en la técnica de Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), para obtener un sistema de análisis de sentimiento basado en aspectos (ABSA), que sólo necesita unas pocas palabras semilla para procesar textos de un idioma o dominio determinados. De este modo, la adaptación a otro idioma o dominio se reduce a la traducción de las palabras semilla correspondientes

Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science

dissertationOver the last decade, social media has emerged as a revolutionary platform for informal communication and social interactions among people. Publicly expressing thoughts, opinions, and feelings is one of the key characteristics of social media. In this dissertation, I present research on automatically acquiring knowledge from social media that can be used to recognize people's affective state (i.e., what someone feels at a given time) in text. This research addresses two types of affective knowledge: 1) hashtag indicators of emotion consisting of emotion hashtags and emotion hashtag patterns, and 2) affective understanding of similes (a form of figurative comparison). My research introduces a bootstrapped learning algorithm for learning hashtag in- dicators of emotions from tweets with respect to five emotion categories: Affection, Anger/Rage, Fear/Anxiety, Joy, and Sadness/Disappointment. With a few seed emotion hashtags per emotion category, the bootstrapping algorithm iteratively learns new hashtags and more generalized hashtag patterns by analyzing emotion in tweets that contain these indicators. Emotion phrases are also harvested from the learned indicators to train additional classifiers that use the surrounding word context of the phrases as features. This is the first work to learn hashtag indicators of emotions. My research also presents a supervised classification method for classifying affective polarity of similes in Twitter. Using lexical, semantic, and sentiment properties of different simile components as features, supervised classifiers are trained to classify a simile into a positive or negative affective polarity class. The property of comparison is also fundamental to the affective understanding of similes. My research introduces a novel framework for inferring implicit properties that 1) uses syntactic constructions, statistical association, dictionary definitions and word embedding vector similarity to generate and rank candidate properties, 2) re-ranks the top properties using influence from multiple simile components, and 3) aggregates the ranks of each property from different methods to create a final ranked list of properties. The inferred properties are used to derive additional features for the supervised classifiers to further improve affective polarity recognition. Experimental results show substantial improvements in affective understanding of similes over the use of existing sentiment resources

Acquiring and Harnessing Verb Knowledge for Multilingual Natural Language Processing

Advances in representation learning have enabled natural language processing models to derive non-negligible linguistic information directly from text corpora in an unsupervised fashion. However, this signal is underused in downstream tasks, where they tend to fall back on superficial cues and heuristics to solve the problem at hand. Further progress relies on identifying and filling the gaps in linguistic knowledge captured in their parameters. The objective of this thesis is to address these challenges focusing on the issues of resource scarcity, interpretability, and lexical knowledge injection, with an emphasis on the category of verbs. To this end, I propose a novel paradigm for efficient acquisition of lexical knowledge leveraging native speakers’ intuitions about verb meaning to support development and downstream performance of NLP models across languages. First, I investigate the potential of acquiring semantic verb classes from non-experts through manual clustering. This subsequently informs the development of a two-phase semantic dataset creation methodology, which combines semantic clustering with fine-grained semantic similarity judgments collected through spatial arrangements of lexical stimuli. The method is tested on English and then applied to a typologically diverse sample of languages to produce the first large-scale multilingual verb dataset of this kind. I demonstrate its utility as a diagnostic tool by carrying out a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art NLP models, probing representation quality across languages and domains of verb meaning, and shedding light on their deficiencies. Subsequently, I directly address these shortcomings by injecting lexical knowledge into large pretrained language models. I demonstrate that external manually curated information about verbs’ lexical properties can support data-driven models in tasks where accurate verb processing is key. Moreover, I examine the potential of extending these benefits from resource-rich to resource-poor languages through translation-based transfer. The results emphasise the usefulness of human-generated lexical knowledge in supporting NLP models and suggest that time-efficient construction of lexicons similar to those developed in this work, especially in under-resourced languages, can play an important role in boosting their linguistic capacity.ESRC Doctoral Fellowship [ES/J500033/1], ERC Consolidator Grant LEXICAL [648909