Analyzing the Language of Food on Social Media

We investigate the predictive power behind the language of food on social media. We collect a corpus of over three million food-related posts from Twitter and demonstrate that many latent population characteristics can be directly predicted from this data: overweight rate, diabetes rate, political leaning, and home geographical location of authors. For all tasks, our language-based models significantly outperform the majority-class baselines. Performance is further improved with more complex natural language processing, such as topic modeling. We analyze which textual features have most predictive power for these datasets, providing insight into the connections between the language of food, geographic locale, and community characteristics. Lastly, we design and implement an online system for real-time query and visualization of the dataset. Visualization tools, such as geo-referenced heatmaps, semantics-preserving wordclouds and temporal histograms, allow us to discover more complex, global patterns mirrored in the language of food.Comment: An extended abstract of this paper will appear in IEEE Big Data 201

Named Entity Recognition and Text Compression

Import 13/01/2017In recent years, social networks have become very popular. It is easy for users to share their data using online social networks. Since data on social networks is idiomatic, irregular, brief, and includes acronyms and spelling errors, dealing with such data is more challenging than that of news or formal texts. With the huge volume of posts each day, effective extraction and processing of these data will bring great benefit to information extraction applications. This thesis proposes a method to normalize Vietnamese informal text in social networks. This method has the ability to identify and normalize informal text based on the structure of Vietnamese words, Vietnamese syllable rules, and a trigram model. After normalization, the data will be processed by a named entity recognition (NER) model to identify and classify the named entities in these data. In our NER model, we use six different types of features to recognize named entities categorized in three predefined classes: Person (PER), Location (LOC), and Organization (ORG). When viewing social network data, we found that the size of these data are very large and increase daily. This raises the challenge of how to decrease this size. Due to the size of the data to be normalized, we use a trigram dictionary that is quite big, therefore we also need to decrease its size. To deal with this challenge, in this thesis, we propose three methods to compress text files, especially in Vietnamese text. The first method is a syllable-based method relying on the structure of Vietnamese morphosyllables, consonants, syllables and vowels. The second method is trigram-based Vietnamese text compression based on a trigram dictionary. The last method is based on an n-gram slide window, in which we use five dictionaries for unigrams, bigrams, trigrams, four-grams and five-grams. This method achieves a promising compression ratio of around 90% and can be used for any size of text file.In recent years, social networks have become very popular. It is easy for users to share their data using online social networks. Since data on social networks is idiomatic, irregular, brief, and includes acronyms and spelling errors, dealing with such data is more challenging than that of news or formal texts. With the huge volume of posts each day, effective extraction and processing of these data will bring great benefit to information extraction applications. This thesis proposes a method to normalize Vietnamese informal text in social networks. This method has the ability to identify and normalize informal text based on the structure of Vietnamese words, Vietnamese syllable rules, and a trigram model. After normalization, the data will be processed by a named entity recognition (NER) model to identify and classify the named entities in these data. In our NER model, we use six different types of features to recognize named entities categorized in three predefined classes: Person (PER), Location (LOC), and Organization (ORG). When viewing social network data, we found that the size of these data are very large and increase daily. This raises the challenge of how to decrease this size. Due to the size of the data to be normalized, we use a trigram dictionary that is quite big, therefore we also need to decrease its size. To deal with this challenge, in this thesis, we propose three methods to compress text files, especially in Vietnamese text. The first method is a syllable-based method relying on the structure of Vietnamese morphosyllables, consonants, syllables and vowels. The second method is trigram-based Vietnamese text compression based on a trigram dictionary. The last method is based on an n-gram slide window, in which we use five dictionaries for unigrams, bigrams, trigrams, four-grams and five-grams. This method achieves a promising compression ratio of around 90% and can be used for any size of text file.460 - Katedra informatikyvyhově

Text pre-processing of multilingual for sentiment analysis based on social network data

Sentiment analysis (SA) is an enduring area for research especially in the field of text analysis. Text pre-processing is an important aspect to perform SA accurately. This paper presents a text processing model for SA, using natural language processing techniques for twitter data. The basic phases for machine learning are text collection, text cleaning, pre-processing, feature extractions in a text and then categorize the data according to the SA techniques. Keeping the focus on twitter data, the data is extracted in domain specific manner. In data cleaning phase, noisy data, missing data, punctuation, tags and emoticons have been considered. For pre-processing, tokenization is performed which is followed by stop word removal (SWR). The proposed article provides an insight of the techniques, that are used for text pre-processing, the impact of their presence on the dataset. The accuracy of classification techniques has been improved after applying text pre-processing and dimensionality has been reduced. The proposed corpus can be utilized in the area of market analysis, customer behaviour, polling analysis, and brand monitoring. The text pre-processing process can serve as the baseline to apply predictive analysis, machine learning and deep learning algorithms which can be extended according to problem definition

Addicting via hashtags: How is Twitter making addiction?

Persons, substances, bodies, consumption: an ever widening process of ‘‘addicting’’ is underway in Western societies. In this article, we turn our attention to the production of addiction on the microblogging social media platform, Twitter, as an important emerging site in which the addicting of contemporary societies is also occurring. Our analysis explores two questions. First, we investigate the ways in which addiction is enacted via Twitter. How is addiction being made on Twitter? Second, we ask how the technology of Twitter itself is shaping meaning: how do the technological ‘‘affordances’’ of Twitter help constitute the kinds of addiction being materialized? While we find a multiplicity of meanings in the 140-character messages, we also find a pattern: a tendency toward extremes—addiction riven between pain and pleasure. In addition, we find significant areas of commonality between approaches and notable silences around alternatives to common understandings of addiction. We argue that the constraints on communication imposed by Twitter technology afford a ‘‘shorthand’’ of addiction that is both revealing and productive. Illuminated is the importance of addiction as a piece of cultural shorthand that draws on and simultaneously reproduces simplistic, reductive addiction objects. In concluding, we consider what these realities of addiction being enacted through Twitter can tell us about contemporary conditions of possibility for drug use in society and for individual subjectivities and experiences

A framework for interrogating social media images to reveal an emergent archive of war

The visual image has long been central to how war is seen, contested and legitimised, remembered and forgotten. Archives are pivotal to these ends as is their ownership and access, from state and other official repositories through to the countless photographs scattered and hidden from a collective understanding of what war looks like in individual collections and dusty attics. With the advent and rapid development of social media, however, the amateur and the professional, the illicit and the sanctioned, the personal and the official, and the past and the present, all seem to inhabit the same connected and chaotic space.However, to even begin to render intelligible the complexity, scale and volume of what war looks like in social media archives is a considerable task, given the limitations of any traditional human-based method of collection and analysis. We thus propose the production of a series of ‘snapshots’, using computer-aided extraction and identification techniques to try to offer an experimental way in to conceiving a new imaginary of war. We were particularly interested in testing to see if twentieth century wars, obviously initially captured via pre-digital means, had become more ‘settled’ over time in terms of their remediated presence today through their visual representations and connections on social media, compared with wars fought in digital media ecologies (i.e. those fought and initially represented amidst the volume and pervasiveness of social media images).To this end, we developed a framework for automatically extracting and analysing war images that appear in social media, using both the features of the images themselves, and the text and metadata associated with each image. The framework utilises a workflow comprising four core stages: (1) information retrieval, (2) data pre-processing, (3) feature extraction, and (4) machine learning. Our corpus was drawn from the social media platforms Facebook and Flickr

A hybrid model for aspect-based sentiment analysis on customer feedback: research on the mobile commerce sector in Vietnam

Feedback and comments on mobile commerce applications are extremely useful and valuable information sources that reflect the quality of products or services to determine whether data is positive or negative and help businesses monitor brand and product sentiment in customers’ feedback and understand customers’ needs. However, the increasing number of comments makes it increasingly difficult to understand customers using manual methods. To solve this problem, this study builds a hybrid research model based on aspect mining and comment classification for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) to deeply comprehend the customer and their experiences. Based on previous classification results, we first construct a dictionary of positive and negative words in the e-commerce field. Then, the POS tagging technique is applied for word classification in Vietnamese to extract aspects of model commerce related to positive or negative words. The model is implemented with machine and deep learning methods on a corpus comprising more than 1,000,000 customer opinions collected from Vietnam's four largest mobile commerce applications. Experimental results show that the Bi-LSTM method has the highest accuracy with 92.01%; it is selected for the proposed model to analyze the viewpoint of words on real data. The findings are that the proposed hybrid model can be applied to monitor online customer experience in real time, enable administrators to make timely and accurate decisions, and improve the quality of products and services to take a competitive advantage

Part-of-speech tagger for Malay social media texts

Processing the meaning of words in social media texts, such as tweets, is challenging in natural language processing. Malay tweets are no exception because they demonstrate distinct linguistic phenomena, such as the use of dialects from each state in Malaysia; borrowing foreign language terms in the context of Malay language; and using mixed languages, abbreviations and spelling errors or mistakes in sentence structure. Tagging the word class of tweets is an arduous task because tweets are characterised by their distinctive style, linguistic sounds and errors. Currently, existing works on Malay part-of-speech (POS) are based only on standard Malay and formal texts and are thus unsuitable for tagging tweet texts. Thus, a POS model of tweet tagging for non-standardised Malay language must be developed. This study aims to design and implement a non-standardised Malay POS model for tweets and performs assessment on the basis of the word tagging accuracy of test data of unnormalised and normalised tweet texts. A solution that adopts a probabilistic POS tagging called QTAG is proposed. Results show that the Malay QTAG achieves best average POS tagging accuracies of 90% and 88.8% for normalised and unnormalised test datasets, respectively