Statistical Inferences for Polarity Identification in Natural Language

Information forms the basis for all human behavior, including the ubiquitous decision-making that people constantly perform in their every day lives. It is thus the mission of researchers to understand how humans process information to reach decisions. In order to facilitate this task, this work proposes a novel method of studying the reception of granular expressions in natural language. The approach utilizes LASSO regularization as a statistical tool to extract decisive words from textual content and draw statistical inferences based on the correspondence between the occurrences of words and an exogenous response variable. Accordingly, the method immediately suggests significant implications for social sciences and Information Systems research: everyone can now identify text segments and word choices that are statistically relevant to authors or readers and, based on this knowledge, test hypotheses from behavioral research. We demonstrate the contribution of our method by examining how authors communicate subjective information through narrative materials. This allows us to answer the question of which words to choose when communicating negative information. On the other hand, we show that investors trade not only upon facts in financial disclosures but are distracted by filler words and non-informative language. Practitioners - for example those in the fields of investor communications or marketing - can exploit our insights to enhance their writings based on the true perception of word choice

Automatic text categorisation of racist webpages

Automatic Text Categorisation (TC) involves the assignment of one or more predefined categories to text documents in order that they can be effectively managed. In this thesis we examine the possibility of applying automatic text categorisation to the problem of categorising texts (web pages) based on whether or not they are racist. TC has proven successful for topic-based problems such as news story categorisation. However, the problem of detecting racism is dissimilar to topic-based problems in that lexical items present in racist documents can also appear in anti-racist documents or indeed potentially any document. The mere presence of a potentially racist term does not necessarily mean the document is racist. The difficulty is finding what discerns racist documents from non-racist. We use a machine learning method called Support Vector Machines (SVM) to automatically learn features of racism in order to be capable of making a decision about the target class of unseen documents. We examine various representations within an SVM so as to identify the most effective method for handling this problem. Our work shows that it is possible to develop automatic categorisation of web pages, based on these approache

Effective Use of Word Order for Text Categorization with Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a neural network that can make use of the internal structure of data such as the 2D structure of image data. This paper studies CNN on text categorization to exploit the 1D structure (namely, word order) of text data for accurate prediction. Instead of using low-dimensional word vectors as input as is often done, we directly apply CNN to high-dimensional text data, which leads to directly learning embedding of small text regions for use in classification. In addition to a straightforward adaptation of CNN from image to text, a simple but new variation which employs bag-of-word conversion in the convolution layer is proposed. An extension to combine multiple convolution layers is also explored for higher accuracy. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in comparison with state-of-the-art methods

Evolving Lucene search queries for text classification

We describe a method for generating accurate, compact, human understandable text classifiers. Text datasets are indexed using Apache Lucene and Genetic Programs are used to construct Lucene search queries. Genetic programs acquire fitness by producing queries that are effective binary classifiers for a particular category when evaluated against a set of training documents. We describe a set of functions and terminals and provide results from classification tasks