Lexicon-based bot-aware public emotion mining and sentiment analysis of the Nigerian 2019 presidential election on Twitter

Online social networks have been widely engaged as rich potential platforms to predict election outcomes' in several countries of the world. The vast amount of readily-available data on such platforms, coupled with the emerging power of natural language processing algorithms and tools, have made it possible to mine and generate foresight into the possible directions of elections' outcome. In this paper, lexicon-based public emotion mining and sentiment analysis were conducted to predict win in the 2019 presidential election in Nigeria. 224,500 tweets, associated with the two most prominent political parties in Nigeria, People's Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressive Congress (APC), and the two most prominent presidential candidates that represented these parties in the 2019 elections, Atiku Abubakar and Muhammadu Buhari, were collected between 9th October 2018 and 17th December 2018 via the Twitter's streaming API. tm and NRC libraries, defined in the 'R' integrated development environment, were used for data cleaning and preprocessing purposes. Botometer was introduced to detect the presence of automated bots in the preprocessed data while NRC Word Emotion Association Lexicon (EmoLex) was used to generate distributions of subjective public sentiments and emotions that surround the Nigerian 2019 presidential election. Emotions were grouped into eight categories (sadness, trust, anger, fear, joy, anticipation, disgust, surprise) while sentiments were grouped into two (negative and positive) based on Plutchik's emotion wheel. Results obtained indicate a higher positive and a lower negative sentiment for APC than was observed with PDP. Similarly, for the presidential aspirants, Atiku has a slightly higher positive and a slightly lower negative sentiment than was observed with Buhari. These results show that APC is the predicted winning party and Atiku as the most preferred winner of the 2019 presidential election. These predictions were corroborated by the actual election results as APC emerged as the winning party while Buhari and Atiku shared very close vote margin in the election. Hence, this research is an indication that twitter data can be appropriately used to predict election outcomes and other offline future events. Future research could investigate spatiotemporal dimensions of the prediction

Rab-KAMS: A reproducible knowledge management system with visualization for preserving Rabbit Farming and Production Knowledge

The sudden rise in rural-to-urban migration has been a key challenge threatening food security and most especially the survival of Rabbit Farming and Production (RFP) in Sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, significant knowledge of RFP is going into extinction as evident by the drastic fall in commercial rabbit farming and production indices. Hence, the need for a system to proactively preserve RFP knowledge for future potential farmers cannot be overemphasized. To this end, knowledge archiving and management are key concepts of ensuring long-term digital storage of conceptual blueprints and specifications of systems, methods and frameworks with capacity for future updates while making such information readily accessible to relevant stakeholders on demand. Therefore, a reproducible Rabbit production' Knowledge Archiving and Management System (Rab-KAMS) is developed in this paper. A 3-staged approach was adopted to develop the Rab-KAMS. This include a knowledge gathering and conceptualization stage; a knowledge revision stage to validate the authenticity and relevance of the gathered knowledge for its intended purpose and a prototype design stage adopting the use of unified modelling language conceptual workflows, ontology graphs and frame system. For seamless accessibility and ubiquitous purposes, the design was implemented into a mobile application having interactive end-users' interfaces developed using XML and Java in Android 3.0.2 Studio development environment while adopting the V-shaped software development model. The qualitative evaluation results obtained for Rab-KAMS based on users' rating and reviews indicate a high level of acceptability and reliability by the users. It also indicates that relevant RFP knowledge were correctly captured and provided in a user-friendly manner. The developed Rab-KAMS could offer seamless acquisition, representation, organization and mining of new and existing verified knowledge about RFP and in turn contributing to food security

Lexicon-Based Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Classification of Climate Change Related Tweets

The concerns for a potential future climate jeopardy has steered actions by youths globally to call the governments to immediately address challenges relating to climate change. In this paper, using natural language processing techniques in data science domain, we analyzed twitter micro-blogging streams to detect emotions and sentiments that surround the Global youth Climate Protest (GloClimePro) with respect to #ThisIsZeroHour, #ClimateJustice and #WeDontHaveTime hashtags. The analysis follows tweet scrapping, cleaning and preprocessing, extraction of GloClimePro-related items, sentiment analysis, emotion classification, and visualization. The results obtained reveal that most people expressed joy, anticipation and trust emotions in the #ThisIsZeroHour and #ClimateJustice action than the few who expressed disgust, sadness and surprise. #ClimateJustice conveys the most positive sentiments, followed by #ThisIsZeroHour and the #WeDontHaveTime. In all the evaluations, a considerable number of people express fear in the climate action and consequences. Thus, climate change stakeholders and policy makers should consider the sentiments and emotions expressed by people and incorporate such outcomes in their various programmes toward addressing the climate change challenges especially as it affects the ecosystem

News Article Classification using Kolmogorov Complexity Distance Measure and Artificial Neural Network

News article classification is a recently growing area of interest in text classification because of its associated multiple matching categories. However, the weak reliability indices and ambiguities associated with state-of-the-art classifiers often employed make success in this domain very limited. Also, the high sensitivity and large disparity in performance results of classifiers to the varying nature of real-world datasets make the need for comparative evaluation inevitable. In this paper, the accuracy and computational time efficiency of the Kolmogorov Complexity Distance Measure (KCDM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) were experimentally evaluated for a prototype large dimensional news article classification problem. 2000 News articles from a dataset of 2225 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news documents (including examples from sport, politics, entertainment, education and technology, and business) were used for categorical testing purposes. Porter’s algorithm was used for word stemming after tokenization and stop-words removal, and a Normalized Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (NTF-IDF) technique was adopted for feature extraction. Experimental results revealed that ANN performs better in terms of accuracy while the KCDM produced better results than ANN in terms of computational time efficiency

Statistical Evaluation of Emerging Feature Extraction Techniques for Aging-Invariant Face Recognition Systems

Large variation in facial appearances of the same individual makes most baseline Aging-Invariant Face Recognition Systems (AI-FRS) suffer from high automatic misclassification of faces. However, some Aging-Invariant Feature Extraction Techniques (AI-FET) for AI-FRS are emerging to help achieve good recognition results when compared to some baseline transformations in conditions with large amount of variations in facial texture and shape. However, the performance results of these AI-FET need to be further investigated statistically to avoid being misled. Statistical significance test can be used to logically justify such performance claims. The statistical significance test would serve as a decision rule to determine the degree of acceptability of the probability to make a wrong decision should such performance claims be found faulty. In this paper, the means between the quantitative results of emerging AI-FET (Histogram of Gradient (HoG), Principal Component Analysis-Linear Discriminant Analysis (PCA-LDA) and Local Binary Pattern-Gabor Wavelet Transform (LBP-GWT)) and the baseline aging-invariant techniques (Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and Gabor Wavelet Transform (GWT)) were computed and compared to determine if those means are statistically significantly different from each other using one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The ANOVA results obtained at 0.05 critical significance level indicate that the results of the emerging AI-FET techniques are not statistically significantly different from those of baseline techniques because the F-critical value was found to be greater than the value of the calculated F-statistics in all the evaluations conducted

Smart face masks for Covid-19 pandemic management : a concise review of emerging architectures, challenges and future research directions

Smart sensing technology has been playing tremendous roles in digital healthcare management over time with great impacts. Lately, smart sensing has awoken the world by the advent of smart face masks (SFMs) in the global fight against the deadly Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. In turn, a number of research studies on innovative SFM architectures and designs are emerging. However, there is currently no study that has systematically been conducted to identify and comparatively analyze the emerging architectures and designs of SFMs, their contributions, socio-technological implications, and current challenges. In this article, we investigate the emerging SFMs in response to Covid-19 pandemic and provide a concise review of their key features and characteristics, design, smart technologies, and architectures. We also highlight and discuss the socio-technological opportunities posed by the use of SFMs and finally present directions for future research. Our findings reveal four key features that can be used to evaluate SFMs to include reusability, self-power generation ability, energy awareness and aerosol filtration efficiency. We discover that SFM has potential for effective use in human tracking, contact tracing, disease detection and diagnosis or in monitoring asymptotic populations in future pandemics. Some SFMs have also been carefully designed to provide comfort and safety when used by patients with other respiratory diseases or comorbidities. However, some identified challenges include standards and quality control, ethical, security and privacy concerns.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=7361hj2023Computer ScienceNon