If people with high risk of suicide can be identified through social media like microblog, it is possible to implement an active intervention system to save their lives. Based on this motivation, the current study administered the Suicide Probability Scale(SPS) to 1041 weibo users at Sina Weibo, which is a leading microblog service provider in China. Two NLP (Natural Language Processing) methods, the Chinese edition of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), are used to extract linguistic features from the Sina Weibo data. We trained predicting models by machine learning algorithm based on these two types of features, to estimate suicide probability based on linguistic features. The experiment results indicate that LDA can find topics that relate to suicide probability, and improve the performance of prediction. Our study adds value in prediction of suicidal probability of social network users with their behaviors.
The study of opinions, their formation and change, is one of the defining topics addressed by social psychology, but in recent years other disciplines, like computer science and complexity, have tried to deal with this issue. Despite the flourishing of different models and theories in both fields, several key questions still remain unanswered. The understanding of how opinions change and the way they are affected by social influence are challenging issues requiring a thorough analysis of opinion per se but also of the way in which they travel between agents' minds and are modulated by these exchanges. To account for the two-faceted nature of opinions, which are mental entities undergoing complex social processes, we outline a preliminary model in which a cognitive theory of opinions is put forward and it is paired with a formal description of them and of their spreading among minds. Furthermore, investigating social influence also implies the necessity to account for the way in which people change their minds, as a consequence of interacting with other people, and the need to explain the higher or lower persistence of such changes.
In manifold learning, algorithms based on graph Laplacians constructed from data have received considerable attention both in practical applications and theoretical analysis. In particular, the convergence of graph Laplacians obtained from sampled data to certain continuous operators has become an active research topic recently. Most of the existing work has been done under the assumption that the data is sampled from a manifold without boundary or that the functions of interests are evaluated at a point away from the boundary. However, the question of boundary behavior is of considerable practical and theoretical interest. In this paper we provide an analysis of the behavior of graph Laplacians at a point near or on the boundary, discuss their convergence rates and their implications and provide some numerical results. It turns out that while points near the boundary occupy only a small part of the total volume of a manifold, the behavior of graph Laplacian there has different scaling properties from its behavior elsewhere on the manifold, with global effects on the whole manifold, an observation with potentially important implications for the general problem of learning on manifolds.
We present a new method for segmenting, and a new user interface for indexing and visualizing, the semantic content of extended instructional videos. Given a series of key frames from the video, we generate a condensed view of the data by clustering frames according to media type and visual similarities. Using various visual filters, key frames are first assigned a media type (board, class, computer, illustration, podium, and sheet). Key frames of media type board and sheet are then clustered based on contents via an algorithm with near-linear cost. A novel user interface, the result of two user studies, displays related topics using icons linked topologically, allowing users to quickly locate semantically related portions of the video. We analyze the accuracy of the segmentation tool on 17 instructional videos, each of which is from 75 to 150 minutes in duration (a total of 40 hours); the classification accuracy exceeds 96%.
Recent machine learning algorithms such as neural networks can classify objects and actions in video frames with high accuracy. Here, I discuss a classification of objects based on basal dynamic patterns referencing one tradition, the link between rabbit, toad, and the Moon, which can be seen in several cultures. In order for them to be classified into one class, a basic pattern of behavior (cyclic appearance and disappearance) works as a feature point. A static character such as the shape and time scale of the behavior are not essential for this classification. In cognitive semantics, image schemas are introduced to describe basal patterns of events. If learning of these image schemas is attained, a machine may be able to categorize rabbit, toad, and the Moon as the same class. For learning, video frames that show boundary boxes or segmentation may be helpful. Although this discussion is preliminary and many tasks remain to be solved, the classification based on basal behaviors can be an important topic for cognitive processes and computer science.
The Donate Speech campaign has so far succeeded in gathering approximately 3600 hours of ordinary, colloquial Finnish speech into the Lahjoita puhetta (Donate Speech) corpus. The corpus includes over twenty thousand speakers from all the regions of Finland and from all age brackets. The primary goals of the collection were to create a representative, large-scale resource to study spontaneous spoken Finnish and to accelerate the development of language technology and speech-based services. In this paper, we present the collection process and the collected corpus, and showcase its versatility through multiple use cases. The evaluated use cases include: automatic speech recognition of spontaneous speech, detection of age, gender, dialect and topic and metadata analysis. We provide benchmarks for the use cases, as well down loadable, trained baseline systems with open-source code for reproducibility. One further use case is to verify the metadata and transcripts given in this corpus itself, and to suggest artificial metadata and transcripts for the part of the corpus where it is missing.
Our opinions and views of life can be shaped by how we perceive the opinions of others on social media like Facebook. This dependence has increased during COVID-19 periods when we have fewer means to connect with others. However, fake news related to COVID-19 has become a significant problem on Facebook. Bengali is the seventh most spoken language worldwide, yet we are aware of no previous research that studied the prevalence of COVID-19 related fake news in Bengali on Facebook. In this paper, we develop machine learning models to detect fake news in Bengali automatically. The best performing model is BERT, with an F1-score of 0.97. We apply BERT on all Facebook Bengali posts related to COVID-19. We find 10 topics in the COVID-19 Bengali fake news grouped into three categories: System (e.g., medical system), belief (e.g., religious rituals), and social (e.g., scientific awareness).
Audio deepfake detection is an emerging topic, which was included in the ASVspoof 2021. However, the recent shared tasks have not covered many real-life and challenging scenarios. The first Audio Deep synthesis Detection challenge (ADD) was motivated to fill in the gap. The ADD 2022 includes three tracks: low-quality fake audio detection (LF), partially fake audio detection (PF) and audio fake game (FG). The LF track focuses on dealing with bona fide and fully fake utterances with various real-world noises etc. The PF track aims to distinguish the partially fake audio from the real. The FG track is a rivalry game, which includes two tasks: an audio generation task and an audio fake detection task. In this paper, we describe the datasets, evaluation metrics, and protocols. We also report major findings that reflect the recent advances in audio deepfake detection tasks.
In this paper, we revisit \emph{feature fusion}, an old-fashioned topic, in the new context of video retrieval by text. Different from previous research that considers feature fusion only at one end, let it be video or text, we aim for feature fusion for both ends within a unified framework. We hypothesize that optimizing the convex combination of the features is preferred to modeling their correlations by computationally heavy multi-head self-attention. Accordingly, we propose Lightweight Attentional Feature Fusion (LAFF). LAFF performs feature fusion at both early and late stages and at both video and text ends, making it a powerful method for exploiting diverse (off-the-shelf) features. Extensive experiments on four public datasets, i.e. MSR-VTT, MSVD, TGIF, VATEX, and the large-scale TRECVID AVS benchmark evaluations (2016-2020) show the viability of LAFF. Moreover, LAFF is extremely simple to implement, making it appealing for real-world deployment.