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

Analyzing fluctuation of topics and public sentiment through social media data

Over the past decade years, Internet users were expending rapidly in the world. They form various online social networks through such Internet platforms as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. These platforms provide a fast way that helps their users receive and disseminate information and express personal opinions in virtual space. When dealing with massive and chaotic social media data, how to accurately determine what events or concepts users are discussing is an interesting and important problem. This dissertation work mainly consists of two parts. First, this research pays attention to mining the hidden topics and user interest trend by analyzing real-world social media activities. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis methods are proposed to classify the social media posts into different sentiment classes and then discover the trend of sentiment based on different topics over time. The presented case study focuses on COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2019. A large amount of Twitter data is collected and used to discover the vaccine-related topics during the pre- and post-vaccine emergency use period. By using the proposed framework, 11 vaccine-related trend topics are discovered. Ultimately the discovered topics can be used to improve the readability of confusing messages about vaccines on social media and provide effective results to support policymakers in making their policy their informed decisions about public health. Second, using conventional topic models cannot deal with the sparsity problem of short text. A novel topic model, named Topic Noise based-Biterm Topic Model with FastText embeddings (TN-BTMF), is proposed to deal with this problem. Word co-occurrence patterns (i.e. biterms) are dirctly generated in BTM. A scoring method based on word co-occurrence and semantic similarity is proposed to detect noise biterms. In th