Social media and sentiment in bioenergy consultation

Purpose: The push to widen participation in public consultation suggests social media as an additional mechanism through which to engage the public. Bioenergy companies need to build their capacity to communicate in these new media and to monitor the attitudes of the public and opposition organisations towards energy development projects. Design/methodology/approach: This short paper outlines the planning issues bioenergy developments face and the main methods of communication used in the public consultation process in the UK. The potential role of social media in communication with stakeholders is identified. The capacity of sentiment analysis to mine opinions from social media is summarised, and illustrated using a sample of tweets containing the term ‘bioenergy’ Findings: Social media have the potential to improve information flows between stakeholders and developers. Sentiment analysis is a viable methodology, which bioenergy companies should be using to measure public opinion in the consultation process. Preliminary analysis shows promising results. Research limitations/implications: Analysis is preliminary and based on a small dataset. It is intended only to illustrate the potential of sentiment analysis and not to draw general conclusions about the bioenergy sector. Originality/value: Opinion mining, though established in marketing and political analysis, is not yet systematically applied as a planning consultation tool. This is a missed opportunity

Cyber-crime Science = Crime Science + Information Security

Cyber-crime Science is an emerging area of study aiming to prevent cyber-crime by combining security protection techniques from Information Security with empirical research methods used in Crime Science. Information security research has developed techniques for protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets but is less strong on the empirical study of the effectiveness of these techniques. Crime Science studies the effect of crime prevention techniques empirically in the real world, and proposes improvements to these techniques based on this. Combining both approaches, Cyber-crime Science transfers and further develops Information Security techniques to prevent cyber-crime, and empirically studies the effectiveness of these techniques in the real world. In this paper we review the main contributions of Crime Science as of today, illustrate its application to a typical Information Security problem, namely phishing, explore the interdisciplinary structure of Cyber-crime Science, and present an agenda for research in Cyber-crime Science in the form of a set of suggested research questions

A new approach to ontology-based semantic modelling for opinion mining

With the fast growth of World Wide Web 2.0, a great number of opinions about a variety of products have been published in blogs, forums, and social networks. Opinion mining tools are needed to enable users to efficiently process a large number of reviews found online, in order to determine the underlying opinions. This paper presents a new methodology for semantic modelling of the domain knowledge for opinion mining. In particular, the new methodology focuses on modelling the domain knowledge in such a way that it can be translated to a formal ontology, which can then be automatically enriched with ground facts obtained from public Linked Open Data resources. The methodology also considers procedures to link between the formal ontology and Natural Language Processing. Our approach successfully enriches the ontology with the relevant ground facts. This ontology can then be used to perform a variety of data mining tasks including sentiment analysis and information retrieval

Feature-Based Opinion Classification Using the KPCA Technique: Concept and Performance Evaluation

Over the last several years, a widespread trend on the internet has been the proliferation of online evaluations written by people with whom they share their ideas, interests, experiences, and opinions. Opinion mining, also known as sentiment analysis, is the process of classifying pieces of text written in a natural language on a subject into positive, negative, or neutral categories according to the human emotions, views, and feelings that are communicated in that text. The field of sentiment analysis has progressed to the point that it can now analyse internet evaluations and provide significant information to people as well as corporations, which may assist these parties in the decision-making process. In the proposed model, feature extraction extracts the collection of features that are both semantically and statistically significant using the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) method. According to the findings of the simulations, the suggested model performs better than other existing models

Task-specific Word Identification from Short Texts Using a Convolutional Neural Network

Task-specific word identification aims to choose the task-related words that best describe a short text. Existing approaches require well-defined seed words or lexical dictionaries (e.g., WordNet), which are often unavailable for many applications such as social discrimination detection and fake review detection. However, we often have a set of labeled short texts where each short text has a task-related class label, e.g., discriminatory or non-discriminatory, specified by users or learned by classification algorithms. In this paper, we focus on identifying task-specific words and phrases from short texts by exploiting their class labels rather than using seed words or lexical dictionaries. We consider the task-specific word and phrase identification as feature learning. We train a convolutional neural network over a set of labeled texts and use score vectors to localize the task-specific words and phrases. Experimental results on sentiment word identification show that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods. We further conduct two case studies to show the effectiveness of our approach. One case study on a crawled tweets dataset demonstrates that our approach can successfully capture the discrimination-related words/phrases. The other case study on fake review detection shows that our approach can identify the fake-review words/phrases.Comment: accepted by Intelligent Data Analysis, an International Journa

Stripping customers' feedback on hotels evaluation through data mining

Com a constante evolução tecnológica e a consequente afluência de partilha de informação entre os consumidores, as plataformas online, como é o caso do TripAdvisor, começaram a ser usadas para análise, principalmente na indústria hoteleira. Estas plataformas permitem aos clientes a partilha de opiniões e a respectiva atribuição de uma avaliação quantitativa aos hotéis visitados. Os estudos publicados têm-se focado, fundamentalmente, na análise dos comentários; contudo, estudos relacionados com a avaliação quantitativa são mais escassos. Este estudo foi desenvolvido através de técnicas de data mining por forma a modelar a pontuação atribuída no TripAdvisor. Foram recolhidos dois comentários por cada mês do ano de 2015 referentes a 21 hotéis localizados na avenida mais emblemática de Las Vegas, a Strip, num total de 504 comentários. A localização foi seleccionada por ser um destino de elevado impato turístico já que a cidade persiste devido à hotelaria e aos casinos. Foram seleccionadas 19 variáveis que representam o utilizador, o hotel e as suas características para alimentarem uma máquina de vectores de suporte objectivando a modelação da avaliação quantitativa para extração de conhecimento. Os resultados atestaram a utilidade do modelo na sua capacidade preditiva. Após esta validação foi aplicada uma análise de sensibilidade ao modelo para compreender a relevância das variáveis. Os resultados revelaram que as variáveis diretamente relacionadas com o utilizador e a sua experiência na utilização do TripAdvisor têm maior influência na atribuição das pontuações, comparativamente com as variáveis relacionadas com o hotel.The emergence of online reviews’ platforms such as TripAdvisor provided tools for tourists to write their opinions and rate hotels with a quantitative score. While numerous studies are found based on textual comments of users, research on the score is rather scarce. This study presents a data mining approach for modeling TripAdvisor score using 504 reviews published in 2015 for the 21 hotels located in the Strip, Las Vegas. Nineteen features characterizing the reviews, hotels and the users were prepared and used for feeding a support vector machine for modeling the score. The results achieved reveal the model is a good approximation for predicting the score. Therefore, a sensitivity analysis was applied over the model for extracting useful knowledge translated into features’ relevance for the score. The findings unveiled user features related to TripAdvisor membership experience play a key role in influencing the scores granted, clearly surpassing hotel features

Deductions from a Sub-Saharan African bank’s tweets: A sentiment analysis approach

The upsurge in social media websites has in no doubt triggered a huge source of data for mining interesting expressions on a variety of subjects. These expressions on social media websites empower firms and individuals to discover varied interpretations regarding the opinions expressed. In Sub-Saharan Africa, financial institutions are making the needed technological investments required to remain competitive in today’s challenging global business environment. Twitter as one of the digital communication tools has in recent times been integrated into the marketing communication tools of banks to augment the free flow of information. In this light, the purpose of the present study is to perform a sentiment analysis on a large dataset of tweets associated with the Ecobank Group, a prominent pan-African bank in sub-Saharan Africa using four different sentiment lexicons to determine the best lexicon based on its performance. Our results show that Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) outperforms all the other three lexicons based on accuracy and computational efficiency. Additionally, we generated a word cloud to visually examine the terms in the positive and negative sentiment categories based on VADER. Our approach demonstrates that in today’s world of empowered customers, firms need to focus on customer engagement to enhance customer experience via social media channels (e.g., Twitter) since the meaning of competitive advantage has shifted from purely competing over price and product to building loyalty and trust. In theory, the study contributes to broadening the scope of online banking given the interplay of consumer sentiments via the social media channel. Limitations and future research directions are discussed at the end of the paper. © 2020, © 2020 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.Tomas Bata University in Zlin [IGA/CebiaTech/2020/001