Traffic congestion is rapidly increasing in urban areas, particularly in mega cities. To date, there exist a few sensor network based systems to address this problem. However, these techniques are not suitable enough in terms of monitoring an entire transportation system and delivering emergency services when needed. These techniques require real-time data and intelligent ways to quickly determine traffic activity from useful information. In addition, these existing systems and websites on city transportation and travel rely on rating scores for different factors (e.g., safety, low crime rate, cleanliness, etc.). These rating scores are not efficient enough to deliver precise information, whereas reviews or tweets are significant, because they help travelers and transportation administrators to know about each aspect of the city. However, it is difficult for travelers to read, and for transportation systems to process, all reviews and tweets to obtain expressive sentiments regarding the needs of the city. The optimum solution for this kind of problem is analyzing the information available on social network platforms and performing sentiment analysis. On the other hand, crisp ontology-based frameworks cannot extract blurred information from tweets and reviews; therefore, they produce inadequate results. In this regard, this paper proposes fuzzy ontology-based sentiment analysis and SWRL rule-based decision-making to monitor transportation activities and to make a city- feature polarity map for travelers. This system retrieves reviews and tweets related to city features and transportation activities. The feature opinions are extracted from these retrieved data, and then fuzzy ontology is used to determine the transportation and city-feature polarity. A fuzzy ontology and an intelligent system prototype are developed by using Prot\'eg\'e OWL and Java, respectively.
Access to word-sentiment associations is useful for many applications, including sentiment analysis, stance detection, and linguistic analysis. However, manually assigning fine-grained sentiment association scores to words has many challenges with respect to keeping annotations consistent. We apply the annotation technique of Best-Worst Scaling to obtain real-valued sentiment association scores for words and phrases in three different domains: general English, English Twitter, and Arabic Twitter. We show that on all three domains the ranking of words by sentiment remains remarkably consistent even when the annotation process is repeated with a different set of annotators. We also, for the first time, determine the minimum difference in sentiment association that is perceptible to native speakers of a language.
The sentiment of a given emoji is traditionally calculated by averaging the ratings {-1, 0 or +1} given by various users to a given context where the emoji appears. However, using such formula complicates the statistical significance analysis particularly for low sample sizes. Here, we provide sentiment scores using odds and a sentiment mapping to a 4-icon scale. We show how odds ratio statistics leads to simpler sentiment analysis. Finally, we provide a list of sentiment scores with the often-missing exact p-values and CI for the most common emoji.
We examine the relationship between social structure and sentiment through the analysis of a large collection of tweets about the Irish Marriage Referendum of 2015. We obtain the sentiment of every tweet with the hashtags #marref and #marriageref that was posted in the days leading to the referendum, and construct networks to aggregate sentiment and use it to study the interactions among users. Our results show that the sentiment of mention tweets posted by users is correlated with the sentiment of received mentions, and there are significantly more connections between users with similar sentiment scores than among users with opposite scores in the mention and follower networks. We combine the community structure of the two networks with the activity level of the users and sentiment scores to find groups of users who support voting `yes' or `no' in the referendum. There were numerous conversations between users on opposing sides of the debate in the absence of follower connections, which suggests that there were efforts by some users to establish dialogue and debate across ideological divisions. Our analysis shows that social structure can be integrated successfully with sentiment to analyse and understand the disposition of social media users. These results have potential applications in the integration of data and meta-data to study opinion dynamics, public opinion modelling, and polling.
We analyze the performance of different sentiment classification models on syntactically complex inputs like A-but-B sentences. The first contribution of this analysis addresses reproducible research: to meaningfully compare different models, their accuracies must be averaged over far more random seeds than what has traditionally been reported. With proper averaging in place, we notice that the distillation model described in arXiv:1603.06318v4 [cs.LG], which incorporates explicit logic rules for sentiment classification, is ineffective. In contrast, using contextualized ELMo embeddings (arXiv:1802.05365v2 [cs.CL]) instead of logic rules yields significantly better performance. Additionally, we provide analysis and visualizations that demonstrate ELMo's ability to implicitly learn logic rules. Finally, a crowdsourced analysis reveals how ELMo outperforms baseline models even on sentences with ambiguous sentiment labels.
Over the recent decades, there has been a significant increase and development of resources for Arabic natural language processing. This includes the task of exploring Arabic Language Sentiment Analysis (ALSA) from Arabic utterances in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and different Arabic dialects. This study focuses on detecting sentiment in poems written in Misurata Arabic sub-dialect spoken in Misurata, Libya. The tools used to detect sentiment from the dataset are Sklearn as well as Mazajak sentiment tool 1. Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Naive Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifiers are used with Sklearn, while the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is implemented with Mazajak. The results show that the traditional classifiers score a higher level of accuracy as compared to Mazajak which is built on an algorithm that includes deep learning techniques. More research is suggested to analyze Arabic sub-dialect poetry in order to investigate the aspects that contribute to sentiments in these multi-line texts; for example, the use of figurative language such as metaphors.
Most recent existing aspect-term level sentiment analysis (ATSA) approaches combined various neural network models with delicately carved attention mechanisms built upon given aspect and context to generate refined sentence representations for better predictions. In these methods, aspect terms are always provided in both training and testing process which may degrade aspect-level analysis into sentence-level prediction. However, the annotated aspect term might be unavailable in real-world scenarios which may challenge the applicability of the existing methods. In this paper, we aim to improve ATSA by discovering the potential aspect terms of the predicted sentiment polarity when the aspect terms of a test sentence are unknown. We access this goal by proposing a capsule network based model named CAPSAR. In CAPSAR, sentiment categories are denoted by capsules and aspect term information is injected into sentiment capsules through a sentiment-aspect reconstruction procedure during the training. As a result, coherent patterns between aspects and sentimental expressions are encapsulated by these sentiment capsules. Experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate these patterns have potential in exploring aspect terms from test sentence when only feeding the sentence to the model. Meanwhile, the proposed CAPSAR can clearly outperform SOTA methods in standard ATSA tasks.
One crucial aspect of sentiment analysis is negation handling, where the occurrence of negation can flip the sentiment of a sentence and negatively affects the machine learning-based sentiment classification. The role of negation in Arabic sentiment analysis has been explored only to a limited extent, especially for colloquial Arabic. In this paper, the author addresses the negation problem of machine learning-based sentiment classification for a colloquial Arabic language. To this end, we propose a simple rule-based algorithm for handling the problem; the rules were crafted based on observing many cases of negation. Additionally, simple linguistic knowledge and sentiment lexicon are used for this purpose. The author also examines the impact of the proposed algorithm on the performance of different machine learning algorithms. The results given by the proposed algorithm are compared with three baseline models. The experimental results show that there is a positive impact on the classifiers accuracy, precision and recall when the proposed algorithm is used compared to the baselines.
Nowadays, with the explosive growth of multimodal reviews on social media platforms, multimodal sentiment analysis has recently gained popularity because of its high relevance to these social media posts. Although most previous studies design various fusion frameworks for learning an interactive representation of multiple modalities, they fail to incorporate sentimental knowledge into inter-modality learning. This paper proposes a Multi-channel Attentive Graph Convolutional Network (MAGCN), consisting of two main components: cross-modality interactive learning and sentimental feature fusion. For cross-modality interactive learning, we exploit the self-attention mechanism combined with densely connected graph convolutional networks to learn inter-modality dynamics. For sentimental feature fusion, we utilize multi-head self-attention to merge sentimental knowledge into inter-modality feature representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on three widely-used datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive performance on accuracy and F1 scores compared to several state-of-the-art approaches.
This project addresses the problem of sentiment analysis in twitter; that is classifying tweets according to the sentiment expressed in them: positive, negative or neutral. Twitter is an online micro-blogging and social-networking platform which allows users to write short status updates of maximum length 140 characters. It is a rapidly expanding service with over 200 million registered users - out of which 100 million are active users and half of them log on twitter on a daily basis - generating nearly 250 million tweets per day. Due to this large amount of usage we hope to achieve a reflection of public sentiment by analysing the sentiments expressed in the tweets. Analysing the public sentiment is important for many applications such as firms trying to find out the response of their products in the market, predicting political elections and predicting socioeconomic phenomena like stock exchange. The aim of this project is to develop a functional classifier for accurate and automatic sentiment classification of an unknown tweet stream.