Africa
Sentiment Analysis of Spanish Political Party Tweets Using Pre-trained Language Models
Song, Chuqiao, Chen, Shunzhang, Cai, Xinyi, Chen, Hao
Abstract: This study investigates sentiment patterns within Spanish political party communications on Twitter by employing BETO and RoBERTuito, two pre-trained language models optimized for Spanish text. With a dataset comprising tweets from major Spanish political parties--PSOE, PP, Vox, Podemos, and Ciudadanos--spanning 2019 to 2024, this research analyzes sentiment distributions and explores the relationship between sentiment and party ideology. Results reveal that both models consistently identify a predominant Neutral sentiment across parties, with significant variations in Negative and Positive sentiments that align with ideological distinctions. Vox exhibits higher levels of Negative sentiment, while PSOE demonstrates a relatively high Positive sentiment, supporting the hypothesis that emotional appeals in political messaging reflect ideological stances. This study highlights the utility of pre-trained models in analyzing non-English social media sentiment and underscores the implications of sentiment dynamics in shaping public discourse within a multi-party system. Keywords: Spanish political parties, sentiment analysis, Twitter, BETO, RoBERTuito, political communication, ideology, social media analysis 1. Introduction In the era of digital politics, social media has emerged as a potent platform where public opinion is actively shaped and reflected. For countries like Spain, where a spectrum of political ideologies coexists, understanding the sentiment behind political communications becomes crucial. Sentiment analysis, particularly on platforms like Twitter, serves as a powerful tool to decode public attitudes and the emotional undertones in political party communications (Cambria et al., 2013; Giachanou & Crestani, 2016). By leveraging sentiment analysis, researchers can quantify and interpret political sentiments, thereby offering insights into party strategies and public reactions. In Spain's unique political landscape, where new and traditional parties like Podemos, PSOE, PP, Ciudadanos, and Vox engage vigorously on social media, analyzing sentiment can reveal the underlying strategies each employs. Recent advancements in pre-trained models tailored for the Spanish language, such as BETO and RoBERTuito, offer refined accuracy in detecting nuanced sentiments within Spanish tweets (Pérez et al., 2021).
LuxBank: The First Universal Dependency Treebank for Luxembourgish
Plum, Alistair, Döhmer, Caroline, Milano, Emilia, Lutgen, Anne-Marie, Purschke, Christoph
The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has significantly expanded linguistic coverage across 161 languages, yet Luxembourgish, a West Germanic language spoken by approximately 400,000 people, has remained absent until now. In this paper, we introduce LuxBank, the first UD Treebank for Luxembourgish, addressing the gap in syntactic annotation and analysis for this `low-research' language. We establish formal guidelines for Luxembourgish language annotation, providing the foundation for the first large-scale quantitative analysis of its syntax. LuxBank serves not only as a resource for linguists and language learners but also as a tool for developing spell checkers and grammar checkers, organising existing text archives and even training large language models. By incorporating Luxembourgish into the UD framework, we aim to enhance the understanding of syntactic variation within West Germanic languages and offer a model for documenting smaller, semi-standardised languages. This work positions Luxembourgish as a valuable resource in the broader linguistic and NLP communities, contributing to the study of languages with limited research and resources.
Development of a Service Robot for Hospital Environments in Rehabilitation Medicine with LiDAR Based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
Ibrayev, Sayat, Ibrayeva, Arman, Amanov, Bekzat, Tolenov, Serik
This paper presents the development and evaluation of a medical service robot equipped with 3D LiDAR and advanced localization capabilities for use in hospital environments. The robot employs LiDAR-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping SLAM to navigate autonomously and interact effectively within complex and dynamic healthcare settings. A comparative analysis with established 3D SLAM technology in Autoware version 1.14.0, under a Linux ROS framework, provided a benchmark for evaluating our system performance. The adaptation of Normal Distribution Transform NDT Matching to indoor navigation allowed for precise real-time mapping and enhanced obstacle avoidance capabilities. Empirical validation was conducted through manual maneuvers in various environments, supplemented by ROS simulations to test the system response to simulated challenges. The findings demonstrate that the robot integration of 3D LiDAR and NDT Matching significantly improves navigation accuracy and operational reliability in a healthcare context. This study highlights the robot ability to perform essential tasks with high efficiency and identifies potential areas for further improvement, particularly in sensor performance under diverse environmental conditions. The successful deployment of this technology in a hospital setting illustrates its potential to support medical staff and contribute to patient care, suggesting a promising direction for future research and development in healthcare robotics.
Differential Privacy Overview and Fundamental Techniques
Fioretto, Ferdinando, Van Hentenryck, Pascal, Ziani, Juba
This chapter is meant to be part of the book "Differential Privacy in Artificial Intelligence: From Theory to Practice" and provides an introduction to Differential Privacy. It starts by illustrating various attempts to protect data privacy, emphasizing where and why they failed, and providing the key desiderata of a robust privacy definition. It then defines the key actors, tasks, and scopes that make up the domain of privacy-preserving data analysis. Following that, it formalizes the definition of Differential Privacy and its inherent properties, including composition, post-processing immunity, and group privacy. The chapter also reviews the basic techniques and mechanisms commonly used to implement Differential Privacy in its pure and approximate forms.
Is network fragmentation a useful complexity measure?
Mouton, Coenraad, Rabe, Randle, Haasbroek, Daniël G., Theunissen, Marthinus W., Potgieter, Hermanus L., Davel, Marelie H.
It has been observed that the input space of deep neural network classifiers can exhibit `fragmentation', where the model function rapidly changes class as the input space is traversed. The severity of this fragmentation tends to follow the double descent curve, achieving a maximum at the interpolation regime. We study this phenomenon in the context of image classification and ask whether fragmentation could be predictive of generalization performance. Using a fragmentation-based complexity measure, we show this to be possible by achieving good performance on the PGDL (Predicting Generalization in Deep Learning) benchmark. In addition, we report on new observations related to fragmentation, namely (i) fragmentation is not limited to the input space but occurs in the hidden representations as well, (ii) fragmentation follows the trends in the validation error throughout training, and (iii) fragmentation is not a direct result of increased weight norms. Together, this indicates that fragmentation is a phenomenon worth investigating further when studying the generalization ability of deep neural networks.
Cybercrime Prediction via Geographically Weighted Learning
Khan, Muhammad Al-Zafar, Al-Karaki, Jamal, Mahafzah, Emad
Inspired by the success of Geographically Weighted Regression and its accounting for spatial variations, we propose GeogGNN -- A graph neural network model that accounts for geographical latitude and longitudinal points. Using a synthetically generated dataset, we apply the algorithm for a 4-class classification problem in cybersecurity with seemingly realistic geographic coordinates centered in the Gulf Cooperation Council region. We demonstrate that it has higher accuracy than standard neural networks and convolutional neural networks that treat the coordinates as features. Encouraged by the speed-up in model accuracy by the GeogGNN model, we provide a general mathematical result that demonstrates that a geometrically weighted neural network will, in principle, always display higher accuracy in the classification of spatially dependent data by making use of spatial continuity and local averaging features.
FASSILA: A Corpus for Algerian Dialect Fake News Detection and Sentiment Analysis
Abdedaiem, Amin, Dahou, Abdelhalim Hafedh, Cheragui, Mohamed Amine, Mathiak, Brigitte
Building a corpus become an important topic in natural language processing (NLP) and especially for low resource languages (ex: AD), due to the importance that the corpus plays in the development of several tools, such as: Machine Translation Babaali and Salem [2022], Part of speech tagging Chiche and Yitagesu [2022], Named entities recognition Jarrar et al. [2022], etc. in particular with the emergence of techniques based on statistics, machine learning and deep learning. Who exploits this mass of information to develop, train and evaluate models. However, building a corpus is not an easy task Bakari et al. [2016]; it is extremely time-consuming and requires a lot of work, for the good reason that the volume and quality of the corpus are two important parameters. Despite the recent emergence of techniques that consume fewer resources, such as few-shot learning Tunstall et al. [2022]. Over the last few years, a lot of studies in NLP have focused on languages or variants of languages called low resources Mengoni and Santucci [2023]. This change of direction is mainly due to the emergence of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, RenRen, LinkedIn, Google+, and Tuenti, as a means of communication where people exchange messages and comments.
Tibyan Corpus: Balanced and Comprehensive Error Coverage Corpus Using ChatGPT for Arabic Grammatical Error Correction
Alrehili, Ahlam, Alhothali, Areej
Natural language processing (NLP) utilizes text data augmentation to overcome sample size constraints. Increasing the sample size is a natural and widely used strategy for alleviating these challenges. In this study, we chose Arabic to increase the sample size and correct grammatical errors. Arabic is considered one of the languages with limited resources for grammatical error correction (GEC). Furthermore, QALB-14 and QALB-15 are the only datasets used in most Arabic grammatical error correction research, with approximately 20,500 parallel examples, which is considered low compared with other languages. Therefore, this study aims to develop an Arabic corpus called "Tibyan" for grammatical error correction using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is used as a data augmenter tool based on a pair of Arabic sentences containing grammatical errors matched with a sentence free of errors extracted from Arabic books, called guide sentences. Multiple steps were involved in establishing our corpus, including the collection and pre-processing of a pair of Arabic texts from various sources, such as books and open-access corpora. We then used ChatGPT to generate a parallel corpus based on the text collected previously, as a guide for generating sentences with multiple types of errors. By engaging linguistic experts to review and validate the automatically generated sentences, we ensured that they were correct and error-free. The corpus was validated and refined iteratively based on feedback provided by linguistic experts to improve its accuracy. Finally, we used the Arabic Error Type Annotation tool (ARETA) to analyze the types of errors in the Tibyan corpus. Our corpus contained 49 of errors, including seven types: orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, punctuation, merge, and split. The Tibyan corpus contains approximately 600 K tokens.
Hypercube Policy Regularization Framework for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Offline reinforcement learning has received extensive attention from scholars because it avoids the interaction between the agent and the environment by learning a policy through a static dataset. However, general reinforcement learning methods cannot get satisfactory results in offline reinforcement learning due to the out-of-distribution state actions that the dataset cannot cover during training. To solve this problem, the policy regularization method that tries to directly clone policies used in static datasets has received numerous studies due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, policy constraint methods make the agent choose the corresponding actions in the static dataset. This type of constraint is usually over-conservative, which results in suboptimal policies, especially in low-quality static datasets. In this paper, a hypercube policy regularization framework is proposed, this method alleviates the constraints of policy constraint methods by allowing the agent to explore the actions corresponding to similar states in the static dataset, which increases the effectiveness of algorithms in low-quality datasets. It was also theoretically demonstrated that the hypercube policy regularization framework can effectively improve the performance of original algorithms. In addition, the hypercube policy regularization framework is combined with TD3-BC and Diffusion-QL for experiments on D4RL datasets which are called TD3-BC-C and Diffusion-QL-C. The experimental results of the score demonstrate that TD3-BC-C and Diffusion-QL-C perform better than state-of-the-art algorithms like IQL, CQL, TD3-BC and Diffusion-QL in most D4RL environments in approximate time.
The Translation of Circumlocution in Arabic Short Stories into English
This study aims at identifying and analyzing circumlocution categories and subcategories in the (SL) and their renditions into the (TL).It is based on criteria proposed for inclusion and exclusion of circumlocution.This study is concerned with the translation of literary texts, specifically short stories, from Arabic into English. It draws on four short stories selected from Arabic famous writers and their parallel translations into English. It hypothesizes that Arabic categories of circumlocution are applicable to English categories of metadiscourse, which include textual and interpersonal items. Nida's (1964) model is adopted in this study to judge the appropriateness in translation the study shows that the translators made serious decisions while opting for various techniques such as addition, subtraction and alteration. In this sense, it investigates whether the translators have successfully and appropriately managed to render the concept of Arabic circumlocution into English or not. The main problems that led to the inappropriate translations were also identified. This study concludes that there are lots of similarities between the categories of circumlocution in Arabic and the categories of metadiscourse in English. These similarities are clear when appropriate renditions are achieved.