Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

Crowdsourcing Emotions in Music Domain

An important source of intelligence for music emotion recognition today comes from user-provided community tags about songs or artists. Recent crowdsourcing approaches such as harvesting social tags, design of collaborative games and web services or the use of Mechanical Turk, are becoming popular in the literature. They provide a cheap, quick and efficient method, contrary to professional labeling of songs which is expensive and does not scale for creating large datasets. In this paper we discuss the viability of various crowdsourcing instruments providing examples from research works. We also share our own experience, illustrating the steps we followed using tags collected from Last.fm for the creation of two music mood datasets which are rendered public. While processing affect tags of Last.fm, we observed that they tend to be biased towards positive emotions; the resulting dataset thus contain more positive songs than negative ones

The impact of sentiment analysis from user on Facebook to enhanced the service quality

Facebook's influence on the modern social media platform is undoubtedly enormous. While it has gotten a backlash for its inability to control its influence over important affairs, there are still many questions regarding people's perception of Facebook and their sentiment over Facebook. This paper's role in this ongoing debate is to give a glimpse of people's sentiment and perception of Facebook in recent times. By collecting samples data from Facebook's Top Page, this paper hopes to represent a significant amount of people's aspirations towards this company. By processing the data with a processing tool to construct and model out the data and a sentiment analyzer tool helps determine the sentiment, this paper can deduce a 600-comment worth of processed data. The results from the 600 sampled comments concluded that the sentiments towards Facebook are 41.50% negative comments, 22.83% neutral comments, and 35.67% positive comments

Text-based Sentiment Analysis and Music Emotion Recognition

Nowadays, with the expansion of social media, large amounts of user-generated texts like tweets, blog posts or product reviews are shared online. Sentiment polarity analysis of such texts has become highly attractive and is utilized in recommender systems, market predictions, business intelligence and more. We also witness deep learning techniques becoming top performers on those types of tasks. There are however several problems that need to be solved for efficient use of deep neural networks on text mining and text polarity analysis. First of all, deep neural networks are data hungry. They need to be fed with datasets that are big in size, cleaned and preprocessed as well as properly labeled. Second, the modern natural language processing concept of word embeddings as a dense and distributed text feature representation solves sparsity and dimensionality problems of the traditional bag-of-words model. Still, there are various uncertainties regarding the use of word vectors: should they be generated from the same dataset that is used to train the model or it is better to source them from big and popular collections that work as generic text feature representations? Third, it is not easy for practitioners to find a simple and highly effective deep learning setup for various document lengths and types. Recurrent neural networks are weak with longer texts and optimal convolution-pooling combinations are not easily conceived. It is thus convenient to have generic neural network architectures that are effective and can adapt to various texts, encapsulating much of design complexity. This thesis addresses the above problems to provide methodological and practical insights for utilizing neural networks on sentiment analysis of texts and achieving state of the art results. Regarding the first problem, the effectiveness of various crowdsourcing alternatives is explored and two medium-sized and emotion-labeled song datasets are created utilizing social tags. One of the research interests of Telecom Italia was the exploration of relations between music emotional stimulation and driving style. Consequently, a context-aware music recommender system that aims to enhance driving comfort and safety was also designed. To address the second problem, a series of experiments with large text collections of various contents and domains were conducted. Word embeddings of different parameters were exercised and results revealed that their quality is influenced (mostly but not only) by the size of texts they were created from. When working with small text datasets, it is thus important to source word features from popular and generic word embedding collections. Regarding the third problem, a series of experiments involving convolutional and max-pooling neural layers were conducted. Various patterns relating text properties and network parameters with optimal classification accuracy were observed. Combining convolutions of words, bigrams, and trigrams with regional max-pooling layers in a couple of stacks produced the best results. The derived architecture achieves competitive performance on sentiment polarity analysis of movie, business and product reviews. Given that labeled data are becoming the bottleneck of the current deep learning systems, a future research direction could be the exploration of various data programming possibilities for constructing even bigger labeled datasets. Investigation of feature-level or decision-level ensemble techniques in the context of deep neural networks could also be fruitful. Different feature types do usually represent complementary characteristics of data. Combining word embedding and traditional text features or utilizing recurrent networks on document splits and then aggregating the predictions could further increase prediction accuracy of such models

Urdu Speech and Text Based Sentiment Analyzer

Discovering what other people think has always been a key aspect of our information-gathering strategy. People can now actively utilize information technology to seek out and comprehend the ideas of others, thanks to the increased availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs. Because of its crucial function in understanding people's opinions, sentiment analysis (SA) is a crucial task. Existing research, on the other hand, is primarily focused on the English language, with just a small amount of study devoted to low-resource languages. For sentiment analysis, this work presented a new multi-class Urdu dataset based on user evaluations. The tweeter website was used to get Urdu dataset. Our proposed dataset includes 10,000 reviews that have been carefully classified into two categories by human experts: positive, negative. The primary purpose of this research is to construct a manually annotated dataset for Urdu sentiment analysis and to establish the baseline result. Five different lexicon- and rule-based algorithms including Naivebayes, Stanza, Textblob, Vader, and Flair are employed and the experimental results show that Flair with an accuracy of 70% outperforms other tested algorithms.Comment: Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, Urdu language, polarity assessment, lexicon-based metho

Sentiment Analysis of Nigerian Students’ Tweets on Education: A Data Mining Approach

The paper is aimed at investigating data mining technologies by acquiring tweets from Nigerian University students on Twitter on how they feel about the current state of the Nigerian university system. The study for this paper was conducted in a way that the tweet data collected using the Twitter Application was pre-processed before being translated from text to vector representation using a feature extraction technique such Bag-of-Words. In the paper, the proposed sentiment analysis architecture was designed using UML and the Naïve Bayes classifier (NBC) approach, which is a simple but effective classifier to determine the polarity of the education dataset, was applied to compute the probabilities of the classes. Furthermore, Naïve Bayes classifier polarized the tweets' wording as negative or positive for polarity. Based on our investigation, the experiment revealed after data cleaning that 4016 of the total data obtained were utilized. Also, Positive attitudes accounted for 40.56%, while negative sentiments accounted for 59.44% of the total data having divided the dataset into 70:30 training and testing ratio, with the Naïve Bayes classifier being taught on the training set and its performance being evaluated on the test set. Because the models were trained on unbalanced data, we employed more relevant evaluation metrics such as precision, recall, F1-score, and balanced accuracy for model evaluation. The classifier's prediction accuracy, misclassification error rate, recall, precision, and f1-score were 63 %, 37%, 63%, 62%, and 62% respectively. All of the analyses were completed using the Python programming language and the Natural Language Tool Kit packages. Finally, the outcome of this prediction is the highest likelihood class. These forecasts can be used by Nigerian Government to improve the educational system and assist students to receive a better education

Analyzing the drivers of customer satisfaction via social media

Social media became a great influence force during the last decade. Active social media user population increased with the new generations. Thus, data started to accumulate in tremendous amounts. Data accumulated through social media offers an opportunity to reach valuable insights and support business decisions. The aim of this project is to understand the drivers of customer satisfaction by public sentiments on Twitter towards a financial institution. Data was extracted from the most popular microblogging platform Twitter and sentiment analysis was performed. The unstructured data was classified by their sentiments with a lexicon-based model and a machine learning based model. The outcome of this study showed machine learning based model successfully overcame the language specific problems and was able to make better predictions where lexicon-based model struggled. Further analysis was performed on the extreme daily average sentiment scores to match these days with prominent events. The results showed that the public sentiment on Twitter is driven by three main themes; complaints related to services, advertisement campaigns, and influencers’ impact.Sosyal medyanın etki alanı geçtiğimiz yıllarla birlikte giderek artmıştır. Yeni jenerasyonlarla birlikte aktif olarak sosyal medya kullanan nüfus artış göstermiştir. Bu sebeple büyük veri birikimi artmıştır. Sosyal medya üzerinden oluşan büyük veri şirketlerin iş yapış şekillerine yönelik değerli kavrayış ve karar alma mekanizmalarına destek fırsatları sunmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın amacı bir finansal kurumun müşterilerinin memnuniyet seviyelerini sosyal medyada oluşan algıyı kullanarak anlamaya çalışmaktır. Çalışma kapsamında kullanılan veri popüler mikro-blog sitesi Twitter üzerinden derlenmiştir. Yapılandırılmamış bu veri sözlük tabanlı ve makine öğrenmesi tabanlı iki model kullanılarak analiz edilmiştir. Çalışma sonucu makine öğrenmesi tabanlı modelin sözlük tabanlı modelin karşılaştığı Türkçe kaynaklı sorunlardan daha az etkilendiği ve daha başarılı tahminler üretebildiğini göstermiştir. Analizin sonraki aşamasında ortalama sonucu aşırı uçlarda çıkan günler aynı günlerde ortaya çıkan olaylar ile eşleştirilmiştir. Ortaya çıkan sonuçlara göre müşteri memnuniyeti sosyal medyada ortaya çıkan üç temel faktörden etkilenmektedir. Bunlar, şikâyet yönetimi, kampanya yönetimi ve sosyal medya fenomenlerinin etkisi olarak tanımlanmaktadır

EngageMe: The Design and Implementation of a Reflective Tool for Evaluating Student Engagement

Recently, there has been a growing push to explore the potential of non-cognitive factors in helping students reach their fullest potential. Engagement, one predictor of student achievement, is such a factor. Because the conditions under which engagement is elicited may vary, EngageMe, a visualization tool, has been developed to assist instructors’ efforts to understand student engagement in the learning process. The application attempts to enhance traditional observation methods by utilizing electrodermal activity, a measure of physiological arousal, as a proximal indicator of engagement. An iterative, participatory design process was used to create prototypes of the EngageMe interface. The results of this design process, a study focused on the barriers to adoption of this kind of technology, as well as an exploratory case study are discussed. Finally, implications for future development are presented

Leveraging Twitter data to understand the dynamics of social media interactions on cryptocurrencies

Rapid technological change in the last decades has led to the emergence of new platforms and fields such as cryptocurrencies and social media data. Cryptocurrencies are decentralized digital currencies that use blockchain technology to create a secure and decentralized environment. In the decade since the inception of social media, it has created revolutions and connected people with interests. Social media platforms such as Twitter allow users worldwide to share opinions, emotions, and news. Twitter is one of the most used social media platforms worldwide. The social media platform has millions of users where tweets are continuously shared every second. Therefore, tweets are useful when a large amount of data is generated to conduct a social media analysis. In addition, Twitter is broadly utilized by investors and financial analysts to gather valuable information. Several studies have shown that the content posted on Twitter can predict the movement of cryptocurrency prices. However, limited research has been conducted on the dynamics of Twitter interactions on cryptocurrencies among users. By leveraging 1724328 tweets, this research aims to understand the dynamics of social media users’ interactions on cryptocurrencies. Essentially by shedding light on larger cryptocurrencies contrary to smaller. The findings reveal that Twitter users are more positive than negative about cryptocurrencies. The analysis also shows an existing relationship between events and the interaction of users, where cryptocurrency-related events shift the emotion, sentiment, and discussion topics of the users. The thesis contributes to demonstrating the effectiveness of the Social set analysis framework to analyze and visualize a massive amount of social media data and user-generated data created on social media platforms such as Twitter