Analysing discussions in social networks using group decision making methods and sentiment analysis

Social networks are one of the most preferred environments for people to carry out debates. Due to the fact that a high amount of people can participate in the process, there is a need of tools that can analyse these discussions and extract useful information from them. In this paper, a novel way of determining how the debate is going on, if there is consensus among the participants and which alternatives are preferred is presented. Sentiment analysis is used in order to measure the level of preference that social media users have about a certain set of alternatives. In order to test the presented scheme, a real application example that makes use of Twitter information is presentedThis paper has been developed with the financing of FEDER funds in the project TIN2016-75850-

Using argumentation in expert's debate to analyze multi-criteria group decision making method results

Recent multi-criteria group decision making methods focus their analysis on the experts preferences. They do not take into account the reasons why each expert has provided a specific set of preferences. In this paper, a method that introduces novel measures capable of explaining the reasons behind experts decisions is presented. A novel concept, the arguments are presented. They represent the experts have for maintaining a certain position in the debate. Several measures related to the arguments are proposed. These new argumentation measures, along with consensus measures, help us to get a clear idea about how and why a specific resolution has been reached. They help us to determine which is the most influential expert, that is, the expert whose contributions to the debate have inspired the rest. Also, the proposed method allows us to determine which are the arguments that most of the experts have followed. A clear overview about how the debate is evolving in terms of arguments is also provided. The novel presented analysis indicate how the experts change their opinions in every round and what was the reason for it, which changes have occurred between rounds and they also provide global analysis results. © 2021 The Author(s

An automatic procedure to create fuzzy ontologies from users’ opinions using sentiment analysis procedures and multi-granular fuzzy linguistic modelling methods

The high amount of information that users continually provides to the Internet is unorganized and difficult to interpret. Unluckily, there is no point in having high amounts of information that we cannot work with. Therefore, there is a need of methods that sort this information and stores it in a way that can be easily accessed and processed. In this paper, a novel method that uses sentiment analysis procedures in order to automatically create fuzzy ontologies from free texts provided by users in social networks is presented. Moreover, multi-granular fuzzy linguistic modelling methods are used in order to select the best representation mean to store the information in the fuzzy ontology. Thanks to the presented method, information is transformed and presented in an organized way making it possible to properly work with it. © 2018 Elsevier Inc

A group decision making support system for the Web: How to work in environments with a high number of participants and alternatives

One of the main challenges that the appearance of Web 2.0 and the overall spreading of the Internet have generated is how to tackle with the high number of users and information available. This problem is also inherited by the group decision making problems that can be carried out over the Web. In this article, to solve this issue, a group decision making support system that allows the use of a high number of participants and alternatives is presented. This method allows any number of participants to join the decision making process at any time. Furthermore, they let them provide information only about a certain subset of alternatives. The high participation rate can provide enough information for the decision process to be carried out even if the participants do not provide information about all the high number of available alternatives. © 2018 Elsevier B.V

Carrying out consensual Group Decision Making processes under social networks using sentiment analysis over comparative expressions

Social networks are the most preferred mean for the people to communicate. Therefore, it is quite usual that experts use them to carry out Group Decision Making processes. One disadvantage that recent Group Decision Making methods have is that they do not allow the experts to use free text to express themselves. On the contrary, they force them to follow a specific user–computer communication structure. This is against social network nature where experts are free to express themselves using their preferred text structure. This paper presents a novel model for experts to carry out Group Decision Making processes using free text and alternatives pairwise comparisons. The main advantage of this method is that it is designed to work using social networks. Sentiment analysis procedures are used to analyze free texts and extract the preferences that the experts provide about the alternatives. Also, our method introduces two ways of applying consensus measures over the Group Decision Making process. They can be used to determine if the experts agree among them or if there are different postures. This way, it is possible to promote the debate in those cases where consensus is low. © 2018 The Author