189 research outputs found
Application of Common Sense Computing for the Development of a Novel Knowledge-Based Opinion Mining Engine
The ways people express their opinions and sentiments have radically changed in the past few years thanks to the advent of social networks, web communities, blogs, wikis and other online collaborative media. The distillation of knowledge from this huge amount of unstructured information can be a key factor for marketers who want to create an image or identity in the minds of their customers for their product, brand, or organisation. These online social data, however, remain hardly accessible to computers, as they are specifically meant for human consumption. The automatic analysis of online opinions, in fact, involves a deep understanding of natural language text by machines, from which we are still very far.
Hitherto, online information retrieval has been mainly based on algorithms relying on the textual representation of web-pages. Such algorithms are very good at retrieving texts, splitting them into parts, checking the spelling and counting their words. But when it comes to interpreting sentences and extracting meaningful information, their capabilities are known to be very limited. Existing approaches to opinion mining and sentiment analysis, in particular, can be grouped into three main categories: keyword spotting, in which text is classified into categories based on the presence of fairly unambiguous affect words; lexical affinity, which assigns arbitrary words a probabilistic affinity for a particular emotion; statistical methods, which calculate the valence of affective keywords and word co-occurrence frequencies on the base of a large training corpus. Early works aimed to classify entire documents as containing overall positive or negative polarity, or rating scores of reviews.
Such systems were mainly based on supervised approaches relying on manually labelled samples, such as movie or product reviews where the opinionistâs overall positive or negative attitude was explicitly indicated. However, opinions and sentiments do not occur only at document level, nor they are limited to a single valence or target. Contrary or complementary attitudes toward the same topic or multiple topics can be present across the span of a document. In more recent works, text analysis granularity has been taken down to segment and sentence level, e.g., by using presence of opinion-bearing lexical items (single words or n-grams) to detect subjective sentences, or by exploiting association rule mining for a feature-based analysis of product reviews. These approaches, however, are still far from being able to infer the cognitive and affective information associated with natural language as they mainly rely on knowledge bases that are still too limited to efficiently process text at sentence level.
In this thesis, common sense computing techniques are further developed and applied to bridge the semantic gap between word-level natural language data and the concept-level opinions conveyed by these. In particular, the ensemble application of graph mining and multi-dimensionality reduction techniques on two common sense knowledge bases was exploited to develop a novel intelligent engine for open-domain opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The proposed approach, termed sentic computing, performs a clause-level semantic analysis of text, which allows the inference of both the conceptual and emotional information associated with natural language opinions and, hence, a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data.
The engine was tested on three different resources, namely a Twitter hashtag repository, a LiveJournal database and a PatientOpinion dataset, and its performance compared both with results obtained using standard sentiment analysis techniques and using different state-of-the-art knowledge bases such as Princetonâs WordNet, MITâs ConceptNet and Microsoftâs Probase. Differently from most currently available opinion mining services, the developed engine does not base its analysis on a limited set of affect words and their co-occurrence frequencies, but rather on common sense concepts and the cognitive and affective valence conveyed by these. This allows the engine to be domain-independent and, hence, to be embedded in any opinion mining system for the development of intelligent applications in multiple fields such as Social Web, HCI and e-health. Looking ahead, the combined novel use of different knowledge bases and of common sense reasoning techniques for opinion mining proposed in this work, will, eventually, pave the way for development of more bio-inspired approaches to the design of natural language processing systems capable of handling knowledge, retrieving it when necessary, making analogies and learning from experience
Application of Common Sense Computing for the Development of a Novel Knowledge-Based Opinion Mining Engine
The ways people express their opinions and sentiments have radically changed in the past few years thanks to the advent of social networks, web communities, blogs, wikis and other online collaborative media. The distillation of knowledge from this huge amount of unstructured information can be a key factor for marketers who want to create an image or identity in the minds of their customers for their product, brand, or organisation. These online social data, however, remain hardly accessible to computers, as they are specifically meant for human consumption. The automatic analysis of online opinions, in fact, involves a deep understanding of natural language text by machines, from which we are still very far.
Hitherto, online information retrieval has been mainly based on algorithms relying on the textual representation of web-pages. Such algorithms are very good at retrieving texts, splitting them into parts, checking the spelling and counting their words. But when it comes to interpreting sentences and extracting meaningful information, their capabilities are known to be very limited. Existing approaches to opinion mining and sentiment analysis, in particular, can be grouped into three main categories: keyword spotting, in which text is classified into categories based on the presence of fairly unambiguous affect words; lexical affinity, which assigns arbitrary words a probabilistic affinity for a particular emotion; statistical methods, which calculate the valence of affective keywords and word co-occurrence frequencies on the base of a large training corpus. Early works aimed to classify entire documents as containing overall positive or negative polarity, or rating scores of reviews.
Such systems were mainly based on supervised approaches relying on manually labelled samples, such as movie or product reviews where the opinionistâs overall positive or negative attitude was explicitly indicated. However, opinions and sentiments do not occur only at document level, nor they are limited to a single valence or target. Contrary or complementary attitudes toward the same topic or multiple topics can be present across the span of a document. In more recent works, text analysis granularity has been taken down to segment and sentence level, e.g., by using presence of opinion-bearing lexical items (single words or n-grams) to detect subjective sentences, or by exploiting association rule mining for a feature-based analysis of product reviews. These approaches, however, are still far from being able to infer the cognitive and affective information associated with natural language as they mainly rely on knowledge bases that are still too limited to efficiently process text at sentence level.
In this thesis, common sense computing techniques are further developed and applied to bridge the semantic gap between word-level natural language data and the concept-level opinions conveyed by these. In particular, the ensemble application of graph mining and multi-dimensionality reduction techniques on two common sense knowledge bases was exploited to develop a novel intelligent engine for open-domain opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The proposed approach, termed sentic computing, performs a clause-level semantic analysis of text, which allows the inference of both the conceptual and emotional information associated with natural language opinions and, hence, a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data.
The engine was tested on three different resources, namely a Twitter hashtag repository, a LiveJournal database and a PatientOpinion dataset, and its performance compared both with results obtained using standard sentiment analysis techniques and using different state-of-the-art knowledge bases such as Princetonâs WordNet, MITâs ConceptNet and Microsoftâs Probase. Differently from most currently available opinion mining services, the developed engine does not base its analysis on a limited set of affect words and their co-occurrence frequencies, but rather on common sense concepts and the cognitive and affective valence conveyed by these. This allows the engine to be domain-independent and, hence, to be embedded in any opinion mining system for the development of intelligent applications in multiple fields such as Social Web, HCI and e-health. Looking ahead, the combined novel use of different knowledge bases and of common sense reasoning techniques for opinion mining proposed in this work, will, eventually, pave the way for development of more bio-inspired approaches to the design of natural language processing systems capable of handling knowledge, retrieving it when necessary, making analogies and learning from experience
Multimodal Video Analysis and Modeling
From recalling long forgotten experiences based on a familiar scent or on a piece of music, to lip reading aided conversation in noisy environments or travel sickness caused by mismatch of the signals from vision and the vestibular system, the human perception manifests countless examples of subtle and effortless joint adoption of the multiple senses provided to us by evolution. Emulating such multisensory (or multimodal, i.e., comprising multiple types of input modes or modalities) processing computationally offers tools for more effective, efficient, or robust accomplishment of many multimedia tasks using evidence from the multiple input modalities. Information from the modalities can also be analyzed for patterns and connections across them, opening up interesting applications not feasible with a single modality, such as prediction of some aspects of one modality based on another. In this dissertation, multimodal analysis techniques are applied to selected video tasks with accompanying modalities. More speciïŹcally, all the tasks involve some type of analysis of videos recorded by non-professional videographers using mobile devices.Fusion of information from multiple modalities is applied to recording environment classiïŹcation from video and audio as well as to sport type classiïŹcation from a set of multi-device videos, corresponding audio, and recording device motion sensor data. The environment classiïŹcation combines support vector machine (SVM) classiïŹers trained on various global visual low-level features with audio event histogram based environment classiïŹcation using k nearest neighbors (k-NN). Rule-based fusion schemes with genetic algorithm (GA)-optimized modality weights are compared to training a SVM classiïŹer to perform the multimodal fusion. A comprehensive selection of fusion strategies is compared for the task of classifying the sport type of a set of recordings from a common event. These include fusion prior to, simultaneously with, and after classiïŹcation; various approaches for using modality quality estimates; and fusing soft conïŹdence scores as well as crisp single-class predictions. Additionally, different strategies are examined for aggregating the decisions of single videos to a collective prediction from the set of videos recorded concurrently with multiple devices. In both tasks multimodal analysis shows clear advantage over separate classiïŹcation of the modalities.Another part of the work investigates cross-modal pattern analysis and audio-based video editing. This study examines the feasibility of automatically timing shot cuts of multi-camera concert recordings according to music-related cutting patterns learnt from professional concert videos. Cut timing is a crucial part of automated creation of multicamera mashups, where shots from multiple recording devices from a common event are alternated with the aim at mimicing a professionally produced video. In the framework, separate statistical models are formed for typical patterns of beat-quantized cuts in short segments, differences in beats between consecutive cuts, and relative deviation of cuts from exact beat times. Based on music meter and audio change point analysis of a new recording, the models can be used for synthesizing cut times. In a user study the proposed framework clearly outperforms a baseline automatic method with comparably advanced audio analysis and wins 48.2 % of comparisons against hand-edited videos
Evaluation Methodologies for Visual Information Retrieval and Annotation
Die automatisierte Evaluation von Informations-Retrieval-Systemen erlaubt
Performanz und QualitÀt der Informationsgewinnung zu bewerten. Bereits in
den 60er Jahren wurden erste Methodologien fĂŒr die system-basierte
Evaluation aufgestellt und in den Cranfield Experimenten ĂŒberprĂŒft.
Heutzutage gehören Evaluation, Test und QualitÀtsbewertung zu einem aktiven
Forschungsfeld mit erfolgreichen Evaluationskampagnen und etablierten
Methoden. Evaluationsmethoden fanden zunÀchst in der Bewertung von
Textanalyse-Systemen Anwendung. Mit dem rasanten Voranschreiten der
Digitalisierung wurden diese Methoden sukzessive auf die Evaluation von
Multimediaanalyse-Systeme ĂŒbertragen. Dies geschah hĂ€ufig, ohne die
Evaluationsmethoden in Frage zu stellen oder sie an die verÀnderten
Gegebenheiten der Multimediaanalyse anzupassen. Diese Arbeit beschÀftigt
sich mit der system-basierten Evaluation von Indizierungssystemen fĂŒr
Bildkollektionen. Sie adressiert drei Problemstellungen der Evaluation von
Annotationen: Nutzeranforderungen fĂŒr das Suchen und Verschlagworten von
Bildern, EvaluationsmaĂe fĂŒr die QualitĂ€tsbewertung von
Indizierungssystemen und Anforderungen an die Erstellung visueller
Testkollektionen. Am Beispiel der Evaluation automatisierter
Photo-Annotationsverfahren werden relevante Konzepte mit Bezug zu
Nutzeranforderungen diskutiert, Möglichkeiten zur Erstellung einer
zuverlÀssigen Ground Truth bei geringem Kosten- und Zeitaufwand vorgestellt
und EvaluationsmaĂe zur QualitĂ€tsbewertung eingefĂŒhrt, analysiert und
experimentell verglichen. Traditionelle MaĂe zur Ermittlung der Performanz
werden in vier Dimensionen klassifiziert. EvaluationsmaĂe vergeben
ĂŒblicherweise binĂ€re Kosten fĂŒr korrekte und falsche Annotationen. Diese
Annahme steht im Widerspruch zu der Natur von Bildkonzepten. Das gemeinsame
Auftreten von Bildkonzepten bestimmt ihren semantischen Zusammenhang und
von daher sollten diese auch im Zusammenhang auf ihre Richtigkeit hin
ĂŒberprĂŒft werden. In dieser Arbeit wird aufgezeigt, wie semantische
Ăhnlichkeiten visueller Konzepte automatisiert abgeschĂ€tzt und in den
Evaluationsprozess eingebracht werden können. Die Ergebnisse der Arbeit
inkludieren ein Nutzermodell fĂŒr die konzeptbasierte Suche von Bildern,
eine vollstĂ€ndig bewertete Testkollektion und neue EvaluationsmaĂe fĂŒr die
anforderungsgerechte QualitÀtsbeurteilung von Bildanalysesystemen.Performance assessment plays a major role in the research on Information
Retrieval (IR) systems. Starting with the Cranfield experiments in the
early 60ies, methodologies for the system-based performance assessment
emerged and established themselves, resulting in an active research field
with a number of successful benchmarking activities. With the rise of the
digital age, procedures of text retrieval evaluation were often transferred
to multimedia retrieval evaluation without questioning their direct
applicability. This thesis investigates the problem of system-based
performance assessment of annotation approaches in generic image
collections. It addresses three important parts of annotation evaluation,
namely user requirements for the retrieval of annotated visual media,
performance measures for multi-label evaluation, and visual test
collections. Using the example of multi-label image annotation evaluation,
I discuss which concepts to employ for indexing, how to obtain a reliable
ground truth to moderate costs, and which evaluation measures are
appropriate. This is accompanied by a thorough analysis of related work on
system-based performance assessment in Visual Information Retrieval (VIR).
Traditional performance measures are classified into four dimensions and
investigated according to their appropriateness for visual annotation
evaluation. One of the main ideas in this thesis adheres to the common
assumption on the binary nature of the score prediction dimension in
annotation evaluation. However, the predicted concepts and the set of true
indexed concepts interrelate with each other. This work will show how to
utilise these semantic relationships for a fine-grained evaluation
scenario. Outcomes of this thesis result in a user model for concept-based
image retrieval, a fully assessed image annotation test collection, and a
number of novel performance measures for image annotation evaluation
Evaluation Methodologies for Visual Information Retrieval and Annotation
Die automatisierte Evaluation von Informations-Retrieval-Systemen erlaubt
Performanz und QualitÀt der Informationsgewinnung zu bewerten. Bereits in
den 60er Jahren wurden erste Methodologien fĂŒr die system-basierte
Evaluation aufgestellt und in den Cranfield Experimenten ĂŒberprĂŒft.
Heutzutage gehören Evaluation, Test und QualitÀtsbewertung zu einem aktiven
Forschungsfeld mit erfolgreichen Evaluationskampagnen und etablierten
Methoden. Evaluationsmethoden fanden zunÀchst in der Bewertung von
Textanalyse-Systemen Anwendung. Mit dem rasanten Voranschreiten der
Digitalisierung wurden diese Methoden sukzessive auf die Evaluation von
Multimediaanalyse-Systeme ĂŒbertragen. Dies geschah hĂ€ufig, ohne die
Evaluationsmethoden in Frage zu stellen oder sie an die verÀnderten
Gegebenheiten der Multimediaanalyse anzupassen. Diese Arbeit beschÀftigt
sich mit der system-basierten Evaluation von Indizierungssystemen fĂŒr
Bildkollektionen. Sie adressiert drei Problemstellungen der Evaluation von
Annotationen: Nutzeranforderungen fĂŒr das Suchen und Verschlagworten von
Bildern, EvaluationsmaĂe fĂŒr die QualitĂ€tsbewertung von
Indizierungssystemen und Anforderungen an die Erstellung visueller
Testkollektionen. Am Beispiel der Evaluation automatisierter
Photo-Annotationsverfahren werden relevante Konzepte mit Bezug zu
Nutzeranforderungen diskutiert, Möglichkeiten zur Erstellung einer
zuverlÀssigen Ground Truth bei geringem Kosten- und Zeitaufwand vorgestellt
und EvaluationsmaĂe zur QualitĂ€tsbewertung eingefĂŒhrt, analysiert und
experimentell verglichen. Traditionelle MaĂe zur Ermittlung der Performanz
werden in vier Dimensionen klassifiziert. EvaluationsmaĂe vergeben
ĂŒblicherweise binĂ€re Kosten fĂŒr korrekte und falsche Annotationen. Diese
Annahme steht im Widerspruch zu der Natur von Bildkonzepten. Das gemeinsame
Auftreten von Bildkonzepten bestimmt ihren semantischen Zusammenhang und
von daher sollten diese auch im Zusammenhang auf ihre Richtigkeit hin
ĂŒberprĂŒft werden. In dieser Arbeit wird aufgezeigt, wie semantische
Ăhnlichkeiten visueller Konzepte automatisiert abgeschĂ€tzt und in den
Evaluationsprozess eingebracht werden können. Die Ergebnisse der Arbeit
inkludieren ein Nutzermodell fĂŒr die konzeptbasierte Suche von Bildern,
eine vollstĂ€ndig bewertete Testkollektion und neue EvaluationsmaĂe fĂŒr die
anforderungsgerechte QualitÀtsbeurteilung von Bildanalysesystemen.Performance assessment plays a major role in the research on Information
Retrieval (IR) systems. Starting with the Cranfield experiments in the
early 60ies, methodologies for the system-based performance assessment
emerged and established themselves, resulting in an active research field
with a number of successful benchmarking activities. With the rise of the
digital age, procedures of text retrieval evaluation were often transferred
to multimedia retrieval evaluation without questioning their direct
applicability. This thesis investigates the problem of system-based
performance assessment of annotation approaches in generic image
collections. It addresses three important parts of annotation evaluation,
namely user requirements for the retrieval of annotated visual media,
performance measures for multi-label evaluation, and visual test
collections. Using the example of multi-label image annotation evaluation,
I discuss which concepts to employ for indexing, how to obtain a reliable
ground truth to moderate costs, and which evaluation measures are
appropriate. This is accompanied by a thorough analysis of related work on
system-based performance assessment in Visual Information Retrieval (VIR).
Traditional performance measures are classified into four dimensions and
investigated according to their appropriateness for visual annotation
evaluation. One of the main ideas in this thesis adheres to the common
assumption on the binary nature of the score prediction dimension in
annotation evaluation. However, the predicted concepts and the set of true
indexed concepts interrelate with each other. This work will show how to
utilise these semantic relationships for a fine-grained evaluation
scenario. Outcomes of this thesis result in a user model for concept-based
image retrieval, a fully assessed image annotation test collection, and a
number of novel performance measures for image annotation evaluation
Recommended from our members
User-centred video abstraction
This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonThe rapid growth of digital video content in recent years has imposed the need for the development of technologies with the capability to produce condensed but semantically rich versions of the input video stream in an effective manner. Consequently, the topic of Video Summarisation is becoming increasingly popular in multimedia community and numerous video abstraction approaches have been proposed accordingly. These recommended techniques can be divided into two major categories of automatic and semi-automatic in accordance with the required level of human intervention in summarisation process. The fully-automated methods mainly adopt the low-level visual, aural and textual features alongside the mathematical and statistical algorithms in furtherance to extract the most significant segments of original video. However, the effectiveness of this type of techniques is restricted by a number of factors such as domain-dependency, computational expenses and the inability to understand the semantics of videos from low-level features. The second category of techniques however, attempts to alleviate the quality of summaries by involving humans in the abstraction process to bridge the semantic gap. Nonetheless, a single userâs subjectivity and other external contributing factors such as distraction will potentially deteriorate the performance of this group of approaches. Accordingly, in this thesis we have focused on the development of three user-centred effective video summarisation techniques that could be applied to different video categories and generate satisfactory results. According to our first proposed approach, a novel mechanism for a user-centred video summarisation has been presented for the scenarios in which multiple actors are employed in the video summarisation process in order to minimise the negative effects of sole user adoption. Based on our recommended algorithm, the video frames were initially scored by a group of video annotators âon the flyâ. This was followed by averaging these assigned scores in order to generate a singular saliency score for each video frame and, finally, the highest scored video frames alongside the corresponding audio and textual contents were extracted to be included into the final summary. The effectiveness of our approach has been assessed by comparing the video summaries generated based on our approach against the results obtained from three existing automatic summarisation tools that adopt different modalities for abstraction purposes. The experimental results indicated that our proposed method is capable of delivering remarkable outcomes in terms of Overall Satisfaction and Precision with an acceptable Recall rate, indicating the usefulness of involving user input in the video summarisation process. In an attempt to provide a better user experience, we have proposed our personalised video summarisation method with an ability to customise the generated summaries in accordance with the viewersâ preferences. Accordingly, the end-userâs priority levels towards different video scenes were captured and utilised for updating the average scores previously assigned by the video annotators. Finally, our earlier proposed summarisation method was adopted to extract the most significant audio-visual content of the video. Experimental results indicated the capability of this approach to deliver superior outcomes compared with our previously proposed method and the three other automatic summarisation tools. Finally, we have attempted to reduce the required level of audience involvement for personalisation purposes by proposing a new method for producing personalised video summaries. Accordingly, SIFT visual features were adopted to identify the video scenesâ semantic categories. Fusing this retrieved data with pre-built usersâ profiles, personalised video abstracts can be created. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of this method in delivering superior outcomes comparing to our previously recommended algorithm and the three other automatic summarisation techniques
Video Abstracting at a Semantical Level
One the most common form of a video abstract is the movie trailer. Contemporary movie trailers share a common structure across genres which allows for an automatic generation and also reflects the corresponding moviea s composition. In this thesis a system for the automatic generation of trailers is presented. In addition to action trailers, the system is able to deal with further genres such as Horror and comedy trailers, which were first manually analyzed in order to identify their basic structures. To simplify the modeling of trailers and the abstract generation itself a new video abstracting application was developed. This application is capable of performing all steps of the abstract generation automatically and allows for previews and manual optimizations. Based on this system, new abstracting models for horror and comedy trailers were created and the corresponding trailers have been automatically generated using the new abstracting models. In an evaluation the automatic trailers were compared to the original Trailers and showed a similar structure. However, the automatically generated trailers still do not exhibit the full perfection of the Hollywood originals as they lack intentional storylines across shots
- âŠ