A Hybrid Approach for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Using Deep Contextual Word Embeddings and Hierarchical Attention

The Web has become the main platform where people express their opinions about entities of interest and their associated aspects. Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to automatically compute the sentiment towards these aspects from opinionated text. In this paper we extend the state-of-the-art Hybrid Approach for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (HAABSA) method in two directions. First we replace the non-contextual word embeddings with deep contextual word embeddings in order to better cope with the word semantics in a given text. Second, we use hierarchical attention by adding an extra attention layer to the HAABSA high-level representations in order to increase the method flexibility in modeling the input data. Using two standard datasets (SemEval 2015 and SemEval 2016) we show that the proposed extensions improve the accuracy of the built model for ABSA.Comment: Accepted for publication in the 20th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2020), Helsinki Finland, 9-12 June 202

Natural Language Processing in-and-for Design Research

We review the scholarly contributions that utilise Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to support the design process. Using a heuristic approach, we collected 223 articles published in 32 journals and within the period 1991-present. We present state-of-the-art NLP in-and-for design research by reviewing these articles according to the type of natural language text sources: internal reports, design concepts, discourse transcripts, technical publications, consumer opinions, and others. Upon summarizing and identifying the gaps in these contributions, we utilise an existing design innovation framework to identify the applications that are currently being supported by NLP. We then propose a few methodological and theoretical directions for future NLP in-and-for design research

Smart city: an advanced framework for analyzing public sentiment orientation toward recycled water

The coronavirus pandemic of the past several years has had a profound impact on all aspects of life, including resource utilization. One notable example is the increased demand for freshwater, a lifeblood of our planet, on the other hand, the smart city vision aims to attain a smart water management goal by investing in innovative solutions such as recycled water systems. However, the problem lies in the public’s sentiment and willingness to use this new resource which discourages investors and hinders the development of this field. Therefore, in our work, we applied sentiment analysis using an extended version of the fuzzy logic and neural network model from our previous work, to find out the general public opinion regarding recycled water and to assess the effects of sentiments on the public’s readiness to use this resource. Our analysis was based on a dataset of over 1 million text content from 2013 to 2022. The results show, from spatio-temporal perspectives, that sentiment orientation and acceptance-behavior towards using recycled water have increased positively. Additionally, the public is more concerned in areas driven by the smart city vision than in areas of medium and low economic development, where investment in sensibilization campaigns is needed

DomainSenticNet: An Ontology and a Methodology Enabling Domain-aware Sentic Computing

[EN] In recent years, SenticNet and OntoSenticNet have represented important developments in the novel interdisciplinary field of research known as sentic computing, enabling the development of a variety of Sentic applications. In this paper, we propose an extension of the OntoSenticNet ontology, named DomainSenticNet, and contribute an unsupervised methodology to support the development of domain-aware Sentic applications. We developed an unsupervised methodology that, for each concept in OntoSenticNet, mines semantically related concepts from WordNet and Probase knowledge bases and computes domain distributional information from the entire collection of Kickstarter domain-specific crowdfunding campaigns. Subsequently, we applied DomainSenticNet to a prototype tool for Kickstarter campaign authoring and success prediction, demonstrating an improvement in the interpretability of sentiment intensities. DomainSenticNet is an extension of the OntoSenticNet ontology that integrates each of the 100,000 concepts included in OntoSenticNet with a set of semantically related concepts and domain distributional information. The defined unsupervised methodology is highly replicable and can be easily adapted to build similar domain-aware resources from different domain corpora and external knowledge bases. Used in combination with OntoSenticNet, DomainSenticNet may favor the development of novel hybrid aspect-based sentiment analysis systems and support further research on sentic computing in domain-aware applications.The work of Paolo Rosso was partially funded by the Spanish MICINN under the project PGC2018-096212-B-C31.Distante, D.; Faralli, S.; Rittinghaus, S.; Rosso, P.; Samsami, N. (2022). DomainSenticNet: An Ontology and a Methodology Enabling Domain-aware Sentic Computing. Cognitive Computation. 14(1):62-77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-021-09825-w627714

Natural Language Processing: Emerging Neural Approaches and Applications

This Special Issue highlights the most recent research being carried out in the NLP field to discuss relative open issues, with a particular focus on both emerging approaches for language learning, understanding, production, and grounding interactively or autonomously from data in cognitive and neural systems, as well as on their potential or real applications in different domains