Read what you need: Controllable Aspect-based Opinion Summarization of Tourist Reviews

Manually extracting relevant aspects and opinions from large volumes of user-generated text is a time-consuming process. Summaries, on the other hand, help readers with limited time budgets to quickly consume the key ideas from the data. State-of-the-art approaches for multi-document summarization, however, do not consider user preferences while generating summaries. In this work, we argue the need and propose a solution for generating personalized aspect-based opinion summaries from large collections of online tourist reviews. We let our readers decide and control several attributes of the summary such as the length and specific aspects of interest among others. Specifically, we take an unsupervised approach to extract coherent aspects from tourist reviews posted on TripAdvisor. We then propose an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) based extractive technique to select an informative subset of opinions around the identified aspects while respecting the user-specified values for various control parameters. Finally, we evaluate and compare our summaries using crowdsourcing and ROUGE-based metrics and obtain competitive results.

StationPlot: A New Non-stationarity Quantification Tool for Detection of Epileptic Seizures

A novel non-stationarity visualization tool known as StationPlot is developed for deciphering the chaotic behavior of a dynamical time series. A family of analytic measures enumerating geometrical aspects of the non-stationarity & degree of variability is formulated by convex hull geometry (CHG) on StationPlot. In the Euclidean space, both trend-stationary (TS) & difference-stationary (DS) perturbations are comprehended by the asymmetric structure of StationPlot's region of interest (ROI). The proposed method is experimentally validated using EEG signals, where it comprehend the relative temporal evolution of neural dynamics & its non-stationary morphology, thereby exemplifying its diagnostic competence for seizure activity (SA) detection. Experimental results & analysis-of-Variance (ANOVA) on the extracted CHG features demonstrates better classification performances as compared to the existing shallow feature based state-of-the-art & validates its efficacy as geometry-rich discriminative descriptors for signal processing applications.