Topic-Specific Sentiment Analysis Can Help Identify Political Ideology

Ideological leanings of an individual can often be gauged by the sentiment one expresses about different issues. We propose a simple framework that represents a political ideology as a distribution of sentiment polarities towards a set of topics. This representation can then be used to detect ideological leanings of documents (speeches, news articles, etc.) based on the sentiments expressed towards different topics. Experiments performed using a widely used dataset show the promise of our proposed approach that achieves comparable performance to other methods despite being much simpler and more interpretable.Comment: Presented at EMNLP Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis, 201

Saúde oral e perfil antropométrico em idades pediátricas: revisão sistemática

O objetivo do presente trabalho foi verificar a influência da ingestão de alimentos e do tipo de alimentos ingeridos na saúde oral e a sua relação com dados antropométricos como o índice de massa corporal (IMC), peso corporal, estatura, composição corporal. Foi efetuada uma revisão sistemática de artigos de investigação científica, realizada em diversos países de todos os continentes, procurando especificar essa relação em crianças dos 2 aos 18 anos, frequentadores de escolas públicas e privadas, oriundas de famílias com diferentes inserções socioeconómicas e regionais. Verifica-se que, de um modo geral, há pior saúde oral em crianças com menor índice de massa corporal e obesidade, bem como de famílias em meios menos favorecidos, com maior consumo de açúcar e alimentação menos rica em nutrientes saudáveis. Todos estes fatores afetam a saúde oral, causando patologias nomeadamente a cárie dentária. Aponta-se para a necessidade de promover melhor educação para a saúde oral, bem como para hábitos nutricionais saudáveis, através de professores e profissionais de saúde, com relevo para o médico de família.This work checked the way food taking and its kind are related to the oral health and to body mass index (BMI), body weight, height and body composition. A systematic revision was done, including several articles of scientific investigation developed in several countries from all the continents, searching to specify that relationship in children aged 2 to 18, in public and private schools, coming from families showing different social, economic and regional origin. A weaker global oral health is observed in children presenting lower body mass index and obesity and also in those belonging to less favoured social and economic environments, with habits of bigger sugar ingestion and poorer nourishment regarding to healthy nutrients. This causes pathologies such as dental caries. There is a major focus on the need of promoting a wider education for oral health in schools and near families, by means of teachers and health authorities, stressing the family´s doctor role

Crisis talk: analysis of the public debate around the energy crisis and cost of living

A prominent media topic in the UK in the early 2020s is the energy crisis affecting the UK and most of Europe. It brings into a single public debate issues of energy dependency and sustainability, fair distribution of economic burdens and cost of living, as well as climate change, risk, and sustainability. In this paper, we investigate the public discourse around the energy crisis and cost of living to identify how these pivotal and contradictory issues are reconciled in this debate and to identify which social actors are involved and the role they play. We analyse a document corpus retrieved from UK newspapers from January 2014 to March 2023. We apply a variety of natural language processing and data visualisation techniques to identify key topics, novel trends, critical social actors, and the role they play in the debate, along with the sentiment associated with those actors and topics. We combine automated techniques with manual discourse analysis to explore and validate the insights revealed in this study. The findings verify the utility of these techniques by providing a flexible and scalable pipeline for discourse analysis and providing critical insights for cost of living – energy crisis nexus research

Measuring information credibility in social media using combination of user profile and message content dimensions

Information credibility in social media is becoming the most important part of information sharing in the society. The literatures have shown that there is no labeling information credibility based on user competencies and their posted topics. This study increases the information credibility by adding new 17 features for Twitter and 49 features for Facebook. In the first step, we perform a labeling process based on user competencies and their posted topic to classify the users into two groups, credible and not credible users, regarding their posted topics. These approaches are evaluated over ten thousand samples of real-field data obtained from Twitter and Facebook networks using classification of Naive Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (Logit) and J48 algorithm (J48). With the proposed new features, the credibility of information provided in social media is increasing significantly indicated by better accuracy compared to the existing technique for all classifiers

Smoke-free legislation and active smoking, second hand smoke exposure and health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries.

Background: Exposure to tobacco smoke imposes a heavy morbidity and mortality burden and exacerbates health inequalities. Whilst the health and economic benefits of smoke-free legislation (SFL) are evident in high income countries (HICs), there is a lack of evidence from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where implementation and monitoring mechanisms are generally weak. Objectives: To examine whether the health benefits of SFL identified in HICs are likely to accrue in LMICs and whether any benefits are evenly distributed between socioeconomic status (SES) groups. Methods: 1) A systematic review was undertaken to examine the impact of SFL on socioeconomic inequalities in tobacco-related health outcomes in adults 2) Secondary analyses of the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) data from 15 LMICs was undertaken to examine inequalities in second hand smoke (SHS) exposure at work and at home 3) Quasi-experimental difference-in-differences study design was used to examine whether the National Tobacco Control Programme (NTCP) in India was associated with reductions in active smoking. Results: 1) Evidence from LMICs examining the health impacts of SFL was sparse. Comprehensive SFL was associated with pro-equity impacts in smoking associated health outcomes in HICs 2) In LMICs, exposure to SHS at workplaces and at homes was higher among the low SES groups. Being employed in a smoke-free workplace in LMICs was associated with reduced exposure to SHS in the home 3) There was no compelling evidence that NTCP reduced bidi and cigarette consumption over and above the general reduction that occurred in all districts in India. Policy implications: Poor implementation of SFL in LMICs is associated with substantial forgone health benefits, especially in the low SES groups. Strengthening tobacco control is key to improve health outcomes and reduce inequalities in LMICs and attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals for Health