#lets-discuss:Analyzing Student Affect in Course Forums Using Emoji

Emoji are commonly used in social media to convey attitudes and emotions. While popular, their use in educational contexts has been sparsely studied. This paper reports on the students’ use of emoji in an online course forum in which students annotate and discuss course material in the margins of the online textbook. For this study, instructors created 11 custom emoji-hashtag pairs that enabled students to quickly communicate affects and reactions in the forum that they experienced while interacting with the course material. Example reporting includes, inviting discussion about a topic, declaring a topic as interesting, or requesting assistance about a topic. We analyze emoji usage by over 1,800 students enrolled in multiple offerings of the same course across multiple academic terms. The data show that some emoji frequently appear together in posts associated with the same paragraphs, suggesting that students use the emoji in this way to communicating complex affective states. We explore the use of computational models for predicting emoji at the post level, even when posts are lacking emoji. This capability can allow instructors to infer information about students’ affective states during their”at home” interactions with course readings. Finally, we show that partitioning the emoji into distinct groups, rather than trying to predict individual emoji, can be both of pedagogical value to instructors and improve the predictive performance of our approach using the BERT language model. Our procedure can be generalized to other courses and for the benefit of other instructors

Social media analytics with applications in disaster management and COVID-19 events

Social media such as Twitter offers a tremendous amount of data throughout an event or a disastrous situation. Leveraging social media data during a disaster is beneficial for effective and efficient disaster management. Information extraction, trend identification, and determining public reactions might help in the future disaster or even avert such an event. However, during a disaster situation, a robust system is required that can be deployed faster and process relevant information with satisfactory performance in real-time. This work outlines the research contributions toward developing such an effective system for disaster management, where it is paramount to develop automated machine-enabled methods that can provide appropriate tags or labels for further analysis for timely situation-awareness. In that direction, this work proposes machine learning models to identify the people who are seeking assistance using social media during a disaster and further demonstrates a prototype application that can collect and process Twitter data in real-time, identify the stranded people, and create rescue scheduling. In addition, to understand the people’s reactions to different trending topics, this work proposes a unique auxiliary feature-based deep learning model with adversarial sample generation for emotion detection using tweets related to COVID-19. This work also presents a custom Q&A-based RoBERTa model for extracting related phrases for emotions. Finally, with the aim of polarization detection, this research work proposes a deep learning pipeline for political ideology detection leveraging the tweet texts and the expressed emotions in the text. This work also studies and conducts the historical emotion and polarization analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA and several individual states using tweeter data --Abstract, page iv

VAuLT: Augmenting the Vision-and-Language Transformer for Sentiment Classification on Social Media

We propose the Vision-and-Augmented-Language Transformer (VAuLT). VAuLT is an extension of the popular Vision-and-Language Transformer (ViLT), and improves performance on vision-and-language (VL) tasks that involve more complex text inputs than image captions while having minimal impact on training and inference efficiency. ViLT, importantly, enables efficient training and inference in VL tasks, achieved by encoding images using a linear projection of patches instead of an object detector. However, it is pretrained on captioning datasets, where the language input is simple, literal, and descriptive, therefore lacking linguistic diversity. So, when working with multimedia data in the wild, such as multimodal social media data, there is a notable shift from captioning language data, as well as diversity of tasks. We indeed find evidence that the language capacity of ViLT is lacking. The key insight of VAuLT is to propagate the output representations of a large language model (LM) like BERT to the language input of ViLT. We show that joint training of the LM and ViLT in VAuLT can yield relative improvements up to 20% over ViLT on VL tasks involving richer language inputs and affective constructs, such as for Target-Oriented Sentiment Classification in TWITTER-2015 and TWITTER-2017, and Sentiment Classification in MVSA-Single and MVSA-Multiple. Our code is available at https://github.com/gchochla/VAuLT.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

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

Contributions to the Computational Treatment of Non-literal Language

A thesis submitted in partial ful lment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Non-literal language concerns the deliberate use of language in such a way that meaning cannot be inferred through a mere literal interpretation. In this thesis, three different forms of this phenomenon are studied; namely, irony, non-compositional Multiword Expressions (MWEs), and metaphor. We start by developing models to identify ironic comments in the context of the social micro-blogging website Twitter. In these experiments, we proposed a new way to extract features based on a study of their spatial structure. The proposed model is shown to perform competitively on a standard Twitter dataset. Next, we extensively study MWEs, which are the central point of focus in this work. We start by framing the task of MWE identi fication as sequence labelling and devise experiments to see the effect of eye-tracking data in capturing formulaic MWEs using structured prediction. We also develop a novel neural architecture to speci fically address the issue of discontinuous MWEs using a combination of Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs) and self-attention. The proposed model is subsequently tested on several languages where it is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art in overall criteria and also in capturing gappy MWEs. In the final part of the thesis, we look at metaphor and its interaction with verbal MWEs. In a series of experiments, we propose a hybrid BERT-based model augmented with a novel variation of GCN where we perform classifi cation on two standard metaphor datasets using information from MWEs. This model which performs at the same level with state-of-the-art is, to the best of our knowledge, the first MWE-aware metaphor identifi cation system paving the way for further experimentation on the interaction of different types of fi gurative language.Research Group in Computational Linguistics

Sentiment Analysis for Social Media

Sentiment analysis is a branch of natural language processing concerned with the study of the intensity of the emotions expressed in a piece of text. The automated analysis of the multitude of messages delivered through social media is one of the hottest research fields, both in academy and in industry, due to its extremely high potential applicability in many different domains. This Special Issue describes both technological contributions to the field, mostly based on deep learning techniques, and specific applications in areas like health insurance, gender classification, recommender systems, and cyber aggression detection

Moment-to-moment mood change modelling in mobile mental health network

Human interests and behaviour change over time and often affected by multiple factors. In particular, human emotions, mood and its constituent processes change and interact over time. Therefore, modelling human behaviour should take into account the changes over time for customization and adaptation of systems to the users’ specific needs. Understanding and assessing the temporal dynamics of mood are critical for modelling human behaviour for both individuals and group of people who share similar habits, life style and personal circumstances. Thus, in order to construct a personalized recommendation for a given user, it is first necessary to have some knowledge about previous user interests and behaviours. However, the challenge of obtaining large-scale data on human emotions has left the most fundamental questions on emotions less explored: How do emotions vary across individuals, evolve over time, and are connected to social ties? We address these questions using a large-scale dataset of users that contains both their users’ interactions with momentary emotions and topical labels. Using this dataset, we identify patterns of human emotions on different levels, starting from the network level, group-level (cluster) and moving towards the user level. At the user-level, we identify how human emotions are distributed and vary over time. In particular, we model changes in mood using multi-level multimodal features including users’ sentimental status, engagement and linguistic queries. We also utilise language models to model and understand patterns of mood change. We model the changes of users’ mental states based on replies and responses to posts over time and predict future states. We find that the future mental states can be predicted with reasonable accuracy given users’ historical posts, current participation features. Our findings form a step forward towards better understand the interplay between user behaviour and mood change exhibited while interacting on mental health network and providing some interpretable summaries that can be used in the future by health experts and individuals and work on possible medical interventions together with clinical experts