A novel approach for clustering sentiments in Chinese blogs based on graph similarity

Blog clustering is an important approach for online public opinion analysis. The traditional clustering methods, usually group blogs by keywords, stories and timeline, which usually ignore opinions and emotions expressed in the blog articles. In this paper, an integrated graph-based model for clustering Chinese blogs by embedded sentiments is proposed. A novel graph-based representation and the corresponding clustering algorithm are applied on the Chinese blog search results. The proposed model SoB-graph considers not only sentiment words but also structural information in blogs. Experimental results show that comparing with the traditional graph-based document representation model and vector space document representation model, the proposed SoB-graph model has achieved better performance in clustering sentiments in Chinese blog documents.     

Sentiment-oriented contextual advertising

Web advertising (Online advertising), a form of advertising that uses the World Wide Web to attract customers, has become one of the world’s most important marketing channels. This paper addresses the mechanism of Content-based advertising (Contextual advertising), which refers to the assignment of relevant ads to a generic web page, e.g., a blog post. As blogs become a platform for expressing personal opinion, they naturally contain various kinds of expressions, including both facts and comments of both a positive and negative nature. Besides, in line with the major tenet of Web 2.0 (i.e., user-centric), we believe that the web-site owners would be willing to be in charge of the ads which are positively related to their contents. Hence, in this paper, we propose the utilization of sentiment detection to improve Web-based contextual advertising. The proposed sentiment-oriented contextual advertising (SOCA) framework aims to combine contextual advertising matching with sentiment analysis to select ads that are related to the positive (and neutral) aspects of a blog and rank them according to their relevance. We experimentally validate our approach using a set of data that includes both real ads and actual blog pages. The results indicate that our proposed method can effectively identify those ads that are positively correlated with the given blog pages.     

SENTIMENT ASSESSMENT OF TEXT BY ANALYZING LINGUISTIC FEATURES AND CONTEXTUAL VALENCE ASSIGNMENT

Text is not only an important medium to describe facts and events, but also to effectively communicate information about the writer's positive or negative sentiment underlying an opinion, or to express an affective or emotional state, such as happiness, fearfulness, surpriseness, and so on. We consider sentiment assessment and emotion sensing from text as two different problems, whereby sentiment assessment is the task that we want to solve first. Thus, this article presents an approach to sentiment assessment, i.e., the recognition of negative or positive valence of a sentence. For the purpose of sentiment recognition from text, we perform semantic dependency analysis on the semantic verb frames of each sentence, and then apply a set of rules to each dependency relation to calculate the contextual valence of the whole sentence. By employing a domain-independent, rule-based approach our system is able to automatically identify sentence-level sentiment. A linguistic tool called “SenseNet” has been developed to recognize sentiments in text, and to visualize the detected sentiments. We conducted several experiments with a variety of datasets containing data from different domains. The obtained results indicate significant performance gains over existing state-of-the-art approaches.     

Dynamic evolution of collective emotions in social networks: a case study of Sina weibo

Emotion is a fundamental object of human existence and determined by a complex set of factors. With the rapid development of online social networks (OSNs), more and more people would like to express their emotion in OSNs, which provides wonderful opportunities to gain insight into how and why individual emotion is evolved in social network. In this paper, we focus on emotion dynamics in OSNs, and try to recognize the evolving process of collective emotions. As a basis of this research, we first construct a corpus and build an emotion classifier based on Bayes theory, and some effective strategies (entropy and salience) are introduced to improve the performance of our classifier, with which we can classify any Chinese tweet into a particular emotion with an accuracy as high as 82%. By analyzing the collective emotions in our sample networks in detail, we get some interesting findings, including a phenomenon of emotion synchronization between friends in OSNs, which offers good evidence for that human emotion can be spread from one person to another. Furthermore, we find that the number of friends has strong correlation with individual emotion. Based on those useful findings, we present a dynamic evolution model of collective emotions, in which both self-evolving process and mutual-evolving process are considered. To this end, extensive simulations on both real and artificial networks have been done to estimate the parameters of our emotion dynamic model, and we find that mutual-evolution plays a more important role than self-evolution in the distribution of collective emotions. As an application of our emotion dynamic model, we design an efficient strategy to control the collective emotions of the whole network by selecting seed users according to k-core rather than degree.     

Organization of digital resources as an original facet for exploring the quiescent information capital of a community

Knowledge workers organize the documents they need for daily task achievement in their personal information spaces (PISs). For a community, people’s PISs constitute in-house value-added resources. Paradoxically, this information source is poorly exploited, as people tend to use external sources (e.g., the Web), although this is probably poorly appropriate in corporate context. This article tackles such information access issues in the common context. Our contribution consists in a faceted visual interface to explore various facets (points of view) of the information of a community, which remains quiescent otherwise. Besides common facets only based on information contents, we propose a new facet relying on the way users in a community manage and organize information. As a result, our approach exploits knowledge workers’ efforts devoted to PIS management, turning them to profit for all, by fostering mutual benefit between stakeholders. The proposed facet relies on an original organization-based similarity measure that we define and experiment.     

Sentiment classification of online reviews to travel destinations by supervised machine learning approaches

The rapid growth in Internet applications in tourism has lead to an enormous amount of personal reviews for travel-related information on the Web. These reviews can appear in different forms like BBS, blogs, Wiki or forum websites. More importantly, the information in these reviews is valuable to both travelers and practitioners for various understanding and planning processes. An intrinsic problem of the overwhelming information on the Internet, however, is information overloading as users are simply unable to read all the available information. Query functions in search engines like Yahoo and Google can help users find some of the reviews that they needed about specific destinations. The returned pages from these search engines are still beyond the visual capacity of humans. In this research, sentiment classification techniques were incorporated into the domain of mining reviews from travel blogs. Specifically, we compared three supervised machine learning algorithms of Naïve Bayes, SVM and the character based N-gram model for sentiment classification of the reviews on travel blogs for seven popular travel destinations in the US and Europe. Empirical findings indicated that the SVM and N-gram approaches outperformed the Naïve Bayes approach, and that when training datasets had a large number of reviews, all three approaches reached accuracies of at least 80%.     

基于统计数据的微博表情符分析及其在情绪分析中的应用

表情符作为一种新兴的网络语言,受到了越来越多的微博用户的青睐。微博中出现的表情符形象直观地表达了博主的情绪,对情绪分析起着至关重要的作用。首先对大量中文微博中表情符的使用特点、分布情况和情绪表达特点进行了统计分析。然后,人工选取具有代表性且情感倾向明确的表情符作为六类基本情绪的种子表情符。根据目标表情符和六类情绪的种子表情符在微博文本中的共现情况,为其建立六维情绪向量,并将其应用于微博情绪分析。在两个数据集上的实验结果表明,本文建立的表情符情绪向量有效地提高了微博情绪识别的精度。     

Embodying Emotions: What Emotion Theorists Can Learn from Simulations of Emotions

Cognitively-oriented theories have dominated the recent history of the study of emotion. However, critics of this perspective suggest the role of the body in the experience of emotion is largely ignored by cognitive theorists. As an alternative to the cognitive perspective, critics are increasingly pointing to William James’ theory, which emphasized somatic aspects of emotions. This emerging emphasis on the embodiment of emotions is shared by those in the field of AI attempting to model human emotions. Behavior-based agents in AI are attempts to model the role the body might play in the experiencing of emotions. Progress in creating such behavior-based models that function in their environments has been slow, suggesting some potential problems with Jamesian alternatives to cognitive perspectives of emotions. Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of embodiment are suggested as alternatives to James’ and as means for addressing the shortcomings of the cognitive perspective.

Emotions in direct and remote social interaction: Getting through the spaces between us

If emotions are oriented to other people’s actions and reactions, then their expression will be affected by available modes of access to interpersonal feedback. This theoretical review paper applies such a relation-alignment perspective to emotions experienced in co-present and remote interpersonal interactions. The role of actual, anticipated, and imagined responses of others in emotion maintenance and adjustment is highlighted. In particular, it is argued that different modes of interpersonal contact afford different styles of emotion presentation, and encourage distinctive varieties of emotional creativity. Thus, although emotion may take different forms in social arrangements distributed through a virtual world, this need not result in more limited forms of interpersonal contact.     

Affective computing with primary and secondary emotions in a virtual human

We introduce the WASABI ([W]ASABI [A]ffect [S]imulation for [A]gents with [B]elievable [I]nteractivity) Affect Simulation Architecture, in which a virtual human’s cognitive reasoning capabilities are combined with simulated embodiment to achieve the simulation of primary and secondary emotions. In modeling primary emotions we follow the idea of “Core Affect” in combination with a continuous progression of bodily feeling in three-dimensional emotion space (PAD space), that is subsequently categorized into discrete emotions. In humans, primary emotions are understood as onto-genetically earlier emotions, which directly influence facial expressions. Secondary emotions, in contrast, afford the ability to reason about current events in the light of experiences and expectations. By technically representing aspects of each secondary emotion’s connotative meaning in PAD space, we not only assure their mood-congruent elicitation, but also combine them with facial expressions, that are concurrently driven by primary emotions. Results of an empirical study suggest that human players in a card game scenario judge our virtual human MAX significantly older when secondary emotions are simulated in addition to primary ones.     

A knowledge-practice perspective on technology-mediated learning

The purpose of the present paper is to examine the relations between Carl Bereiter’s and Marlene Scardamalia’s knowledge-building approach and social practices. It is argued that technology enhances learning through transformed social practices. In order to truly contribute to educational transformation, pedagogical approaches have to be embedded in locally cultivated “knowledge practices” that channel the participants’ intellectual efforts in a way that elicits collective advancement of knowledge. Consequently, knowledge advancement is not just about putting students’ ideas into the centre but depends on corresponding transformation of social practices of working with knowledge. Creation of cultures which advance knowledge presupposes sustained efforts of teacher-practitioners, collaborating with students and researchers, aimed at iteratively transforming prevailing knowledge practices toward more innovative ones.     

Modeling appraisal in theory of mind reasoning

Cognitive appraisal theories, which link human emotional experience to their interpretations of events happening in the environment, are leading approaches to model emotions. Cognitive appraisal theories have often been used both for simulating “real emotions” in virtual characters and for predicting the human user’s emotional experience to facilitate human–computer interaction. In this work, we investigate the computational modeling of appraisal in a multi-agent decision-theoretic framework using Partially Observable Markov Decision Process-based (POMDP) agents. Domain-independent approaches are developed for five key appraisal dimensions (motivational relevance, motivation congruence, accountability, control and novelty). We also discuss how the modeling of theory of mind (recursive beliefs about self and others) is realized in the agents and is critical for simulating social emotions. Our model of appraisal is applied to three different scenarios to illustrate its usages. This work not only provides a solution for computationally modeling emotion in POMDP-based agents, but also illustrates the tight relationship between emotion and cognition—the appraisal dimensions are derived from the processes and information required for the agent’s decision-making and belief maintenance processes, which suggests a uniform cognitive structure for emotion and cognition.     

Computational modelling of switching behaviour in repeated gambles

We present a computational model which predicts people’s switching behaviour in repeated gambling scenarios such as the Iowa Gambling Task. This Utility-Caution model suggests that people’s tendency to switch away from an option is due to a utility factor which reflects the probability and the amount of losses experienced compared to gains, and a caution factor which describes the number of choices made consecutively in that option. Using a novel next-choice-prediction method, the Utility-Caution model was tested using two sets of data on the performance of participants in the Iowa Gambling Task. The model produced significantly more accurate predictions of people’s choices than the previous Bayesian expected-utility model and expectancy-valence model.     

Sentiment analysis incorporating convolutional neural network into hidden Markov model

The analysis of sentiments and mining of opinions have become more and more important in years because of the development of social media technologies. The methods that utilize natural language processing and lexicon-based sentiment analysis techniques to analyze people's opinions in texts require the proper extraction of sentiment words to ensure accuracy. The current issue is tackled with a novel perspective in this paper by introducing a hybrid sentiment analysis technique. This technique brings together Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), to accurately categorize text data and pinpoint feelings. The proposed method involves 1D convolutional-layer CNN to extract hidden features from comments and applying HMMs on a feature-sentence matrix, allowing for the utilization of word sequences in extracting opinions. The method effectively captures diverse text patterns by extracting a range of features from texts using CNN. Text patterns are learned using text HMM by calculating the probabilities between sequences of feature vectors and clustering feature vectors. The paper's experimental evaluation employs benchmark datasets such as CR, MR, Subj, and SST2, demonstrating that the proposed method surpasses existing sentiment analysis techniques and traditional HMMs. One of its strengths is to analyze a range of text patterns and identify crucial features that recognize the emotion of different pieces of a sentence. Additionally, the research findings highlight the improved performance of sentiment analysis tasks through the strategic use of zero padding in conjunction with the masking technique.     

Parameter Tuned Machine Learning Based Emotion Recognition on Arabic Twitter Data

Arabic is one of the most spoken languages across the globe. However, there are fewer studies concerning Sentiment Analysis (SA) in Arabic. In recent years, the detected sentiments and emotions expressed in tweets have received significant interest. The substantial role played by the Arab region in international politics and the global economy has urged the need to examine the sentiments and emotions in the Arabic language. Two common models are available: Machine Learning and lexicon-based approaches to address emotion classification problems. With this motivation, the current research article develops a Teaching and Learning Optimization with Machine Learning Based Emotion Recognition and Classification (TLBOML-ERC) model for Sentiment Analysis on tweets made in the Arabic language. The presented TLBOML-ERC model focuses on recognising emotions and sentiments expressed in Arabic tweets. To attain this, the proposed TLBOML-ERC model initially carries out data pre-processing and a Continuous Bag Of Words (CBOW)-based word embedding process. In addition, Denoising Autoencoder (DAE) model is also exploited to categorise different emotions expressed in Arabic tweets. To improve the efficacy of the DAE model, the Teaching and Learning-based Optimization (TLBO) algorithm is utilized to optimize the parameters. The proposed TLBOML-ERC method was experimentally validated with the help of an Arabic tweets dataset. The obtained results show the promising performance of the proposed TLBOML-ERC model on Arabic emotion classification.     

多目标情感分类中文数据集构建及分析研究

目标级情感分类任务是为了得到句子中特定评价目标的情感倾向.一个句子中往往存在多个目标,多个目标的情感可能一致,也可能不一致.但在已有针对目标级情感分类的评测数据集中:①大多数是一个句子一个目标;②在少数有多个目标的句子中,多个目标情感倾向分布并不均衡,多个目标情感一致的句子占较大比例.数据集本身的缺陷限制了模型针对多个...     

The case of sculpting atmospheres: towards design principles for expressive tangible interaction in control of ambient systems

According to the vision of Ambient Intelligence, technology will seamlessly merge into people’s everyday activities and environments. A challenge facing designers of such systems is to create interfaces that fit in people’s everyday contexts and incorporate the values of daily life. This paper focuses on tangible expressive interaction as one possible approach towards linking everyday experiences to intuitive forms of interaction and presents a number of principles for expressive interaction design in this field. A case study of a tangible expressive interface to control a living room atmosphere projection system (orchestrating living room lighting, audio and video-art) is presented to illustrate and reflect upon the design principles. Furthermore, the case study describes possible techniques towards integrating the design principles into a design method.     

Understand Students Feedback Using Bi-Integrated CRF Model Based Target Extraction

Educational institutions showing interest to find the opinion of the students about their course and the instructors to enhance the teaching-learning process. For this, most research uses sentiment analysis to track students’ behavior. Traditional sentence-level sentiment analysis focuses on the whole sentence sentiment. Previous studies show that the sentiments alone are not enough to observe the feeling of the students because different words express different sentiments in a sentence. There is a need to extract the targets in a given sentence which helps to find the sentiment towards those targets. Target extraction is the subtask of targeted sentiment analysis. In this paper, we proposed the innovative model to find the targets of the given sentence using Bi-Integrated Conditional Random Fields (CRF). A Parallel fusion neural network model is designed to perform this task. We evaluate the model using the Michigan dataset and we build a dataset for target extraction from student reviews. The experimental results show that our proposed fusion model achieves better results compared to baseline models.     

A formal model of emotions for an empathic rational dialog agent

Recent research has shown that virtual agents expressing empathic emotions toward users have the potential to enhance human–machine interaction. To provide empathic capabilities to a rational dialog agent, we propose a formal model of emotions based on an empirical and theoretical analysis of the users’ conditions of emotion elicitation. The emotions are represented by particular mental states of the agent, composed of beliefs, uncertainties and intentions. This semantically grounded formal representation enables a rational dialog agent to identify from a dialogical situation the empathic emotion that it should express. An implementation and an evaluation of an empathic rational dialog agent have enabled us to validate the proposed model of empathy.