12 research outputs found
Learning and Forecasting Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks
Social media and social networking sites have become a global pinboard for
exposition and discussion of news, topics, and ideas, where social media users
often update their opinions about a particular topic by learning from the
opinions shared by their friends. In this context, can we learn a data-driven
model of opinion dynamics that is able to accurately forecast opinions from
users? In this paper, we introduce SLANT, a probabilistic modeling framework of
opinion dynamics, which represents users opinions over time by means of marked
jump diffusion stochastic differential equations, and allows for efficient
model simulation and parameter estimation from historical fine grained event
data. We then leverage our framework to derive a set of efficient predictive
formulas for opinion forecasting and identify conditions under which opinions
converge to a steady state. Experiments on data gathered from Twitter show that
our model provides a good fit to the data and our formulas achieve more
accurate forecasting than alternatives
Tripartite Graph Clustering for Dynamic Sentiment Analysis on Social Media
The growing popularity of social media (e.g, Twitter) allows users to easily
share information with each other and influence others by expressing their own
sentiments on various subjects. In this work, we propose an unsupervised
\emph{tri-clustering} framework, which analyzes both user-level and tweet-level
sentiments through co-clustering of a tripartite graph. A compelling feature of
the proposed framework is that the quality of sentiment clustering of tweets,
users, and features can be mutually improved by joint clustering. We further
investigate the evolution of user-level sentiments and latent feature vectors
in an online framework and devise an efficient online algorithm to sequentially
update the clustering of tweets, users and features with newly arrived data.
The online framework not only provides better quality of both dynamic
user-level and tweet-level sentiment analysis, but also improves the
computational and storage efficiency. We verified the effectiveness and
efficiency of the proposed approaches on the November 2012 California ballot
Twitter data.Comment: A short version is in Proceeding of the 2014 ACM SIGMOD International
Conference on Management of dat
A transfer learning approach for sentiment classification.
The idea of developing machine learning systems or Artificial Intelligence agents that would learn from different tasks and be able to accumulate that knowledge with time so that it functions successfully on a new task that it has not seen before is an idea and a research area that is still being explored. In this work, we will lay out an algorithm that allows a machine learning system or an AI agent to learn from k different domains then uses some or no data from the new task for the system to perform strongly on that new task. In order to test our algorithm, we chose an AI task that falls under the Natural Language Processing domain and that is sentiment analysis. The idea was to combine sentiment classifiers trained on different source domains to test them on a new domain. The algorithm was tested on two benchmark datasets. The results recorded were compared against the results reported on these two datasets in 2017 and 2018. In order to combine these classifiersâ predictions, we had to assign these classifiers weights. The algorithm made use of the similarity between domains when inferring the weights for the classifiers trained on the source domains by measuring the similarity between these source domains and the domain of the new task concluding, that domain similarity could be used in computing weights for classifiers trained on previous tasks/domains
Personalized Expert Recommendation: Models and Algorithms
Many large-scale information sharing systems including social media systems, questionanswering
sites and rating and reviewing applications have been growing rapidly, allowing
millions of human participants to generate and consume information on an unprecedented
scale. To manage the sheer growth of information generation, there comes the need to enable
personalization of information resources for users â to surface high-quality content
and feeds, to provide personally relevant suggestions, and so on. A fundamental task in
creating and supporting user-centered personalization systems is to build rich user profile
to aid recommendation for better user experience.
Therefore, in this dissertation research, we propose models and algorithms to facilitate
the creation of new crowd-powered personalized information sharing systems. Specifically,
we first give a principled framework to enable personalization of resources so that
information seekers can be matched with customized knowledgeable users based on their
previous historical actions and contextual information; We then focus on creating rich
user models that allows accurate and comprehensive modeling of user profiles for long
tail users, including discovering userâs known-for profile, userâs opinion bias and userâs
geo-topic profile. In particular, this dissertation research makes two unique contributions:
First, we introduce the problem of personalized expert recommendation and propose
the first principled framework for addressing this problem. To overcome the sparsity issue,
we investigate the use of userâs contextual information that can be exploited to build robust
models of personal expertise, study how spatial preference for personally-valuable expertise
varies across regions, across topics and based on different underlying social communities,
and integrate these different forms of preferences into a matrix factorization-based
personalized expert recommender.
Second, to support the personalized recommendation on experts, we focus on modeling
and inferring user profiles in online information sharing systems. In order to tap
the knowledge of most majority of users, we provide frameworks and algorithms to accurately
and comprehensively create user models by discovering userâs known-for profile,
userâs opinion bias and userâs geo-topic profile, with each described shortly as follows:
âWe develop a probabilistic model called Bayesian Contextual Poisson Factorization
to discover what users are known for by others. Our model considers as input a small fraction
of users whose known-for profiles are already known and the vast majority of users for
whom we have little (or no) information, learns the implicit relationships between user?s
known-for profiles and their contextual signals, and finally predict known-for profiles for
those majority of users.
âWe explore userâs topic-sensitive opinion bias, propose a lightweight semi-supervised
system called âBiasWatchâ to semi-automatically infer the opinion bias of long-tail users,
and demonstrate how userâs opinion bias can be exploited to recommend other users with
similar opinion in social networks.
â We study how a userâs topical profile varies geo-spatially and how we can model
a userâs geo-spatial known-for profile as the last step in our dissertation for creation of
rich user profile. We propose a multi-layered Bayesian hierarchical user factorization to
overcome user heterogeneity and an enhanced model to alleviate the sparsity issue by integrating
user contexts into the two-layered hierarchical user model for better representation
of userâs geo-topic preference by others
Design of an E-learning system using semantic information and cloud computing technologies
Humanity is currently suffering from many difficult problems that threaten the life and survival of the human race. It is very easy for all mankind to be affected, directly or indirectly, by these problems. Education is a key solution for most of them. In our thesis we tried to make use of current technologies to enhance and ease the learning process.
We have designed an e-learning system based on semantic information and cloud computing, in addition to many other technologies that contribute to improving the educational process and raising the level of students. The design was built after much research on useful technology, its types, and examples of actual systems that were previously discussed by other researchers.
In addition to the proposed design, an algorithm was implemented to identify topics found in large textual educational resources. It was tested and proved to be efficient against other methods. The algorithm has the ability of extracting the main topics from textual learning resources, linking related resources and generating interactive dynamic knowledge graphs. This algorithm accurately and efficiently accomplishes those tasks even for bigger books. We used Wikipedia Miner, TextRank, and Gensim within our algorithm. Our algorithmâs accuracy was evaluated against Gensim, largely improving its accuracy.
Augmenting the system design with the implemented algorithm will produce many useful services for improving the learning process such as: identifying main topics of big textual learning resources automatically and connecting them to other well defined concepts from Wikipedia, enriching current learning resources with semantic information from external sources, providing student with browsable dynamic interactive knowledge graphs, and making use of learning groups to encourage students to share their learning experiences and feedback with other learners.Programa de Doctorado en IngenierĂa TelemĂĄtica por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Luis SĂĄnchez FernĂĄndez.- Secretario: Luis de la Fuente ValentĂn.- Vocal: Norberto FernĂĄndez GarcĂ
Personalized Expert Recommendation: Models and Algorithms
Many large-scale information sharing systems including social media systems, questionanswering
sites and rating and reviewing applications have been growing rapidly, allowing
millions of human participants to generate and consume information on an unprecedented
scale. To manage the sheer growth of information generation, there comes the need to enable
personalization of information resources for users â to surface high-quality content
and feeds, to provide personally relevant suggestions, and so on. A fundamental task in
creating and supporting user-centered personalization systems is to build rich user profile
to aid recommendation for better user experience.
Therefore, in this dissertation research, we propose models and algorithms to facilitate
the creation of new crowd-powered personalized information sharing systems. Specifically,
we first give a principled framework to enable personalization of resources so that
information seekers can be matched with customized knowledgeable users based on their
previous historical actions and contextual information; We then focus on creating rich
user models that allows accurate and comprehensive modeling of user profiles for long
tail users, including discovering userâs known-for profile, userâs opinion bias and userâs
geo-topic profile. In particular, this dissertation research makes two unique contributions:
First, we introduce the problem of personalized expert recommendation and propose
the first principled framework for addressing this problem. To overcome the sparsity issue,
we investigate the use of userâs contextual information that can be exploited to build robust
models of personal expertise, study how spatial preference for personally-valuable expertise
varies across regions, across topics and based on different underlying social communities,
and integrate these different forms of preferences into a matrix factorization-based
personalized expert recommender.
Second, to support the personalized recommendation on experts, we focus on modeling
and inferring user profiles in online information sharing systems. In order to tap
the knowledge of most majority of users, we provide frameworks and algorithms to accurately
and comprehensively create user models by discovering userâs known-for profile,
userâs opinion bias and userâs geo-topic profile, with each described shortly as follows:
âWe develop a probabilistic model called Bayesian Contextual Poisson Factorization
to discover what users are known for by others. Our model considers as input a small fraction
of users whose known-for profiles are already known and the vast majority of users for
whom we have little (or no) information, learns the implicit relationships between user?s
known-for profiles and their contextual signals, and finally predict known-for profiles for
those majority of users.
âWe explore userâs topic-sensitive opinion bias, propose a lightweight semi-supervised
system called âBiasWatchâ to semi-automatically infer the opinion bias of long-tail users,
and demonstrate how userâs opinion bias can be exploited to recommend other users with
similar opinion in social networks.
â We study how a userâs topical profile varies geo-spatially and how we can model
a userâs geo-spatial known-for profile as the last step in our dissertation for creation of
rich user profile. We propose a multi-layered Bayesian hierarchical user factorization to
overcome user heterogeneity and an enhanced model to alleviate the sparsity issue by integrating
user contexts into the two-layered hierarchical user model for better representation
of userâs geo-topic preference by others
Sentiment Prediction Using Collaborative Filtering
Learning sentiment models from short texts such as tweets is a notoriously challenging problem due to very strong noise and data sparsity. This paper presents a novel, collaborative filtering-based approach for sentiment prediction in twitter conversation threads. Given a set of sentiment holders and sentiment targets, we assume we know the true sentiments for a small fraction of holder-target pairs. This information is then used to predict the sentiment of a previously unknown user towards another user or an entity using collaborative filtering algorithms. We validate our model on two Twitter datasets using different collaborative filtering techniques. Our preliminary results demonstrate that the proposed approach can be effectively used in twitter sentiment prediction, thus mitigating the data sparsity problem