Fusing Audio, Textual and Visual Features for Sentiment Analysis of News Videos

This paper presents a novel approach to perform sentiment analysis of news videos, based on the fusion of audio, textual and visual clues extracted from their contents. The proposed approach aims at contributing to the semiodiscoursive study regarding the construction of the ethos (identity) of this media universe, which has become a central part of the modern-day lives of millions of people. To achieve this goal, we apply state-of-the-art computational methods for (1) automatic emotion recognition from facial expressions, (2) extraction of modulations in the participants' speeches and (3) sentiment analysis from the closed caption associated to the videos of interest. More specifically, we compute features, such as, visual intensities of recognized emotions, field sizes of participants, voicing probability, sound loudness, speech fundamental frequencies and the sentiment scores (polarities) from text sentences in the closed caption. Experimental results with a dataset containing 520 annotated news videos from three Brazilian and one American popular TV newscasts show that our approach achieves an accuracy of up to 84% in the sentiments (tension levels) classification task, thus demonstrating its high potential to be used by media analysts in several applications, especially, in the journalistic domain.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Medi

An unified cosmological evolution driven by a mass dimension one fermionic field

An unified cosmological model for an Universe filled with a mass dimension one (MDO) fermionic field plus the standard matter fields is considered. After a primordial quantum fluctuation the field slowly rolls down to the bottom of a symmetry breaking potential, driving the Universe to an inflationary regime that increases the scale factor for about 71 e-folds. After the end of inflation, the field starts to oscillate and can transfer its energy to the standard model particles through a reheating mechanism. Such a process is briefly discussed in terms of the admissible couplings of the MDO field with the electromagnetic and Higgs fields. We show that even if the field loses all its kinetic energy during reheating, it can evolve as dark matter due a gravitational coupling (of spinorial origin) with baryonic matter. Since the field acquires a constant value at the bottom of the potential, a non-null, although tiny, mass term acts as a dark energy component nowadays. Therefore, we conclude that MDO fermionic field is a good candidate to drive the whole evolution of the Universe, in such a way that the inflationary field, dark matter and dark energy are described by different manifestations of a single field.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

The formation of IRIS diagnostics I. A quintessential model atom of Mg II and general formation properties of the Mg II h&k lines

NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) space mission will study how the solar atmosphere is energized. IRIS contains an imaging spectrograph that covers the Mg II h&k lines as well as a slit-jaw imager centered at Mg II k. Understanding the observations will require forward modeling of Mg II h&k line formation from 3D radiation-MHD models. This paper is the first in a series where we undertake this forward modeling. We discuss the atomic physics pertinent to h&k line formation, present a quintessential model atom that can be used in radiative transfer computations and discuss the effect of partial redistribution (PRD) and 3D radiative transfer on the emergent line profiles. We conclude that Mg II h&k can be modeled accurately with a 4-level plus continuum Mg II model atom. Ideally radiative transfer computations should be done in 3D including PRD effects. In practice this is currently not possible. A reasonable compromise is to use 1D PRD computations to model the line profile up to and including the central emission peaks, and use 3D transfer assuming complete redistribution to model the central depression.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, accepted for Ap