Rule-based Opinion Target and Aspect Extraction to Acquire Affective Knowledge

Opinion holder and opinion target extraction are among the most popular and challenging problems tackled by opinion mining researchers, recognizing the significant business value of such components and their importance for applications such as media monitoring and Web intelligence. This paper describes an approach that combines opinion target extraction with aspect extraction using syntactic patterns. It expands previous work limited by sentence boundaries and includes a heuristic for anaphora resolution to identify targets across sentences. Furthermore, it demonstrates the application of concepts known from research on open information extraction to the identification of relevant opinion aspects. Qualitative analyses performed on a corpus of 100 000 Amazon product reviews show that the approach is promising. The extracted opinion targets and aspects are useful for enriching common knowledge resources and opinion mining ontologies, and support practitioners and researchers to identify opinions in document collections

Concepts, Introspection, and Phenomenal Consciousness: An Information-Theoretical Approach

This essay is a sustained information-theoretic attempt to bring new light on some of the perennial problems in the philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection. Following Dretske (1981), we present and develop an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call <em>sensory concepts</em>, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call <em>phenomenal concepts</em>: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, like RED. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them

Assessment in anatomy

From an educational perspective, a very important problem is that of assessment, for establishing competency and as selection criterion for different professional purposes. Among the issues to be addressed are the methods of assessment and/or the type of tests, the range of scores, or the definition of honour degrees. The methods of assessment comprise such different forms such as the spotter examination, short or long essay questions, short answer questions, true-false questions, single best answer questions, multiple choice questions, extended match questions, or several forms of oral approaches such as viva voce examinations.Knowledge about this is important when assessing different educational objectives; assessing educational objectives from the cognitive domain will need different assessment instruments than assessing educational objectives from the psychomotor domain or even the affective domain.There is no golden rule, which type of assessment instrument or format will be the best in measuring certain educational objectives; but one has to respect that there is no assessment instrument, which is capable to assess educational objectives from all domains of educational objectives.Whereas the first two or three levels of progress can be assessed by well-structured written examinations such as multiple choice questions, or multiple answer questions, other and higher level progresses need other instruments, such as a thesis, or direct observation.This is no issue at all in assessment tools, where the students are required to select the appropriate answer from a given set of choices, as in true false questions, MCQ, EMQ, etc. The standard setting is done in these cases by the selection of the true answer

Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Econometrics meets sentiment : an overview of methodology and applications

The advent of massive amounts of textual, audio, and visual data has spurred the development of econometric methodology to transform qualitative sentiment data into quantitative sentiment variables, and to use those variables in an econometric analysis of the relationships between sentiment and other variables. We survey this emerging research field and refer to it as sentometrics, which is a portmanteau of sentiment and econometrics. We provide a synthesis of the relevant methodological approaches, illustrate with empirical results, and discuss useful software

Sentiment analysis of clinical narratives: A scoping review

A clinical sentiment is a judgment, thought or attitude promoted by an observation with respect to the health of an individual. Sentiment analysis has drawn attention in the healthcare domain for secondary use of data from clinical narratives, with a variety of applications including predicting the likelihood of emerging mental illnesses or clinical outcomes. The current state of research has not yet been summarized. This study presents results from a scoping review aiming at providing an overview of sentiment analysis of clinical narratives in order to summarize existing research and identify open research gaps. The scoping review was carried out in line with the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews) guideline. Studies were identified by searching 4 electronic databases (e.g., PubMed, IEEE Xplore) in addition to conducting backward and forward reference list checking of the included studies. We extracted information on use cases, methods and tools applied, used datasets and performance of the sentiment analysis approach. Of 1,200 citations retrieved, 29 unique studies were included in the review covering a period of 8 years. Most studies apply general domain tools (e.g. TextBlob) and sentiment lexicons (e.g. SentiWordNet) for realizing use cases such as prediction of clinical outcomes; others proposed new domain-specific sentiment analysis approaches based on machine learning. Accuracy values between 71.5-88.2% are reported. Data used for evaluation and test are often retrieved from MIMIC databases or i2b2 challenges. Latest developments related to artificial neural networks are not yet fully considered in this domain. We conclude that future research should focus on developing a gold standard sentiment lexicon, adapted to the specific characteristics of clinical narratives. Efforts have to be made to either augment existing or create new high-quality labeled data sets of clinical narratives. Last, the suitability of state-of-the-art machine learning methods for natural language processing and in particular transformer-based models should be investigated for their application for sentiment analysis of clinical narratives

Desarrollo de un cuestionario para evaluar las competencias psicosociales de los estudiantes de psicología previas a una experiencia de aprendizaje colaborativo

The purpose of this research is to develop a questionnaire that evaluates the psychosocial competencies that students who attend social psychology expect to acquire as a result of a collaborative project-based learning process. Its compilation responds to the need to measure psychosocial constructs that have barely been studied in the teaching of social psychology in an environment of collaborative learning. Moreover, its responds to the need of brief scales development to avoid redundancies and fatigue when responding. Socio-cognitive and affective studies were used as the basis for drafting a questionnaire that was administered to second-year undergraduates in Psychology. The sample consists of 203 students studying the compulsory subject Social Psychology. The average age of 20 years old. The questionnaire’s psychometric properties were studied by combining the perspective of the classic approach of the theory of tests and exploratory factor analysis with confirmatory factor analysis and biplot geometry. The items were specifically drafted for this research, taking into account a review of the literature on competencies among university students, the specific characteristics of the situation of practicals based on group projects. Psychometric analyses confirmed a multidimensional structure made up of six factors with high overall internal consistency: attitude toward social psychology, self-perception as a student, expectations on competencies, practical self-efficacy and emotional state. The questionnaire provides a reliable measure of the cognitive, attitudinal and affective-emotional competencies perceived by the students themselves that will significantly underscore their academic achievements and their professional careers. The questionnaire helps lecturers to understand what students think about their own level of competencies in order to manage a hands-on teaching project that responds to the subject’s purpose.El propósito de este estudio es elaborar un cuestionario que evalúe las competencias psicosociales que esperan adquirir los estudiantes que cursan psicología social como resultado de un proceso de aprendizaje colaborativo por proyectos. Su creación obedece a la necesidad de medir constructos psicosociales que apenas han sido estudiados en el aprendizaje de la psicología social en un contexto de aprendizaje colaborativo. También responde a la necesidad de elaborar escalas breves que eviten redundancias y fatiga a la hora de responder. Partiendo de modelos sociocognitivos y afectivos se elaboró un cuestionario que se aplicó a estudiantes de segundo curso de Psicología. La muestra está formada por 203 estudiantes que cursan la asignatura obligatoria de Psicología Social. La media de edad es de 20 años. Las propiedades psicométricas del cuestionario se estudiaron combinando la perspectiva del enfoque clásico de la teoría de los tests y el análisis factorial exploratorio con el análisis factorial confirmatorio y la geometría biplot. Los ítems fueron específicamente creados para este estudio, teniendo en cuenta la revisión de la literatura sobre competencias de estudiantes universitarios, las características específicas de la situación de prácticas basada en proyectos grupales. Los análisis psicométricos confirmaron una estructura multidimensional conformada por seis factores con una alta consistencia interna total: actitud hacia la psicología social, autopercepción como estudiante, expectativas de competencias, autoeficacia práctica y estado emocional. El cuestionario mide de forma fiable competencias cognitivas, actitudinales y afectivo-emocionales percibidas por los propios estudiantes que van a determinar de forma significativa sus logros académicos y su futuro profesional. El cuestionario ayuda al docente a conocer qué piensan los estudiantes sobre su propio nivel de competencias para así gestionar un proyecto de enseñanza práctica que responda a la finalidad de la materia

Review on recent advances in information mining from big consumer opinion data for product design

In this paper, based on more than ten years' studies on this dedicated research thrust, a comprehensive review concerning information mining from big consumer opinion data in order to assist product design is presented. First, the research background and the essential terminologies regarding online consumer opinion data are introduced. Next, studies concerning information extraction and information utilization of big consumer opinion data for product design are reviewed. Studies on information extraction of big consumer opinion data are explained from various perspectives, including data acquisition, opinion target recognition, feature identification and sentiment analysis, opinion summarization and sampling, etc. Reviews on information utilization of big consumer opinion data for product design are explored in terms of how to extract critical customer needs from big consumer opinion data, how to connect the voice of the customers with product design, how to make effective comparisons and reasonable ranking on similar products, how to identify ever-evolving customer concerns efficiently, and so on. Furthermore, significant and practical aspects of research trends are highlighted for future studies. This survey will facilitate researchers and practitioners to understand the latest development of relevant studies and applications centered on how big consumer opinion data can be processed, analyzed, and exploited in aiding product design