Using Knowledge Organization Systems to automatically detect forward-looking sentiment in company reports to infer social phenomena.

The study investigates whether existing Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) for strong and hesitant forward-looking sentiment could be improved to detect social phenomena.Five judges identified examples of strong/hesitant forward-looking sentiment which were used to compare the KOS developed in the study, to existing models. The ‘composite’ KOS was subsequently applied to annual company reports to generate word frequency and biologically inspired diversity ratios. Critical Realism was used as a philosophy to interpret word patterns.Results indicate the composite KOS improved on existing models identified in the literature for strong forward-looking sentiment. In one company, a statistically significant association was found between increasing diversity of assertive forward-looking sentiment and subsequent declining relative business performance. This supported the Pollyanna effect: the social phenomena of over-positive business language in that company. Sharp increases in mentions of the ‘future’ and ‘learnings’ was discovered in another company which may be explained by an industrial disaster and subsequent crisis management rhetoric, supporting Discourse of Renewal Theory.This study shows that improvements can be made to existing KOS used to detect forward-looking sentiment in reports. Adopting Critical Realism as a philosophy when analysing ‘big data’ may lead to improved theory generation and the potential for differentiating insights

Getting Past the Language Gap: Innovations in Machine Translation

In this chapter, we will be reviewing state of the art machine translation systems, and will discuss innovative methods for machine translation, highlighting the most promising techniques and applications. Machine translation (MT) has benefited from a revitalization in the last 10 years or so, after a period of relatively slow activity. In 2005 the field received a jumpstart when a powerful complete experimental package for building MT systems from scratch became freely available as a result of the unified efforts of the MOSES international consortium. Around the same time, hierarchical methods had been introduced by Chinese researchers, which allowed the introduction and use of syntactic information in translation modeling. Furthermore, the advances in the related field of computational linguistics, making off-the-shelf taggers and parsers readily available, helped give MT an additional boost. Yet there is still more progress to be made. For example, MT will be enhanced greatly when both syntax and semantics are on board: this still presents a major challenge though many advanced research groups are currently pursuing ways to meet this challenge head-on. The next generation of MT will consist of a collection of hybrid systems. It also augurs well for the mobile environment, as we look forward to more advanced and improved technologies that enable the working of Speech-To-Speech machine translation on hand-held devices, i.e. speech recognition and speech synthesis. We review all of these developments and point out in the final section some of the most promising research avenues for the future of MT

Negation Processing in Spanish and its Application to Sentiment Analysis

El Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural es el área de la Inteligencia Artificial que tiene como objetivo desarrollar mecanismos computacionalmente eficientes para facilitar la comunicación entre personas y máquinas por medio del lenguaje natural. Para que las máquinas sean capaces de procesar, comprender y generar lenguaje humano hay que tener en cuenta una amplia gama de fenómenos lingüísticos, como la negación, la ironía o el sarcasmo, que se utilizan para dar a las palabras un significado diferente. Esta tesis doctoral se centra en el estudio de la negación, un fenómeno lingüístico complejo que utilizamos en nuestra comunicación diaria. A diferencia de la mayoría de los estudios existentes hasta el momento se realiza sobre textos en español, ya que es la segunda lengua con más hablantes nativos, la tercera más utilizada en Internet, y no existen sistemas de procesamiento de negación disponibles en esta lengua.Natural Language Processing is the area of Artificial Intelligence that aims to develop computationally efficient mechanisms to facilitate communication between people and machines through natural language. To ensure that machines are capable of processing, understanding and generating human language, a wide range of linguistic phenomena must be taken into account, such as negation, irony or sarcasm, which are used to give words a different meaning. This doctoral thesis focuses on the study of negation, a complex linguistic phenomenon that we use in our daily communication. In contrast to most of the existing studies to date, it is carried out on Spanish texts, because i) it is the second language with most native speakers, ii) it is the third language most used on the Internet, and iii) there are no negation processing systems available on this language.Tesis Univ. Jaén. Departamento de Informática. Leída el 13 de septiembre de 2019