This paper focusses on the main issues related to the development of a corpus for opinion and sentiment analysis, with a special attention to irony, and presents as a case study Senti-TUT, a project for Italian aimed at investigating sentiment and irony in social media. We present the Senti-TUT corpus, a collection of texts from Twitter annotated with sentiment polarity. We describe the dataset, the annotation, the methodologies applied and our investigations on two important features of irony: polarity reversing and emotion expressions.

A clear separation of the constitutive from the regulative specification would bring many advantages, mostly as direct We analyze the emerging trends from research on effects of the obtained modularity: easier reuse of actions in multi-agent interaction protocols, on workflows and different contexts, easier customization on the protocol, easier on business processes. We propose a definition of composition of protocols. As a consequence, MAS would gain commitment-based interaction protocols, characterized greater openness, interoperability, and modularity of design.

This demonstration presents a concatenative synthesis engine for the generation of musical accompaniments, based on chord progressions. The system takes a player's song recording as input, and generates the accompaniment for any other song, based on the input content. We show that working on accompaniment requires a special care about temporal deviations at the border of the sliced chunks, because they make most of the rhythmic groove. We address it by discriminating accidental deviations against intentional ones, in order to correct the first while keeping the second. We will provide a full demonstration of the system, from the recording process to the generation, in various conditions, inviting the audience to participate.

But growing up, in conflict with her father We present a graphic novel project aiming at illustrating current research results and issues regarding the creative process and its relation with artificial intelligence. The main character, Max Order, is an artist who symbolizes the difficulty of coming up with new, creative ideas, giving up imitation of others and finding one's own style.

Visual families are seen as sets of artifacts that share common visual features allowing one to intuitively classify them as belonging to the same family. An evolutionary approach for the creation of such families of shapes, where each genotype encodes a visual language by means of a non-deterministic grammar is explored.

With the prevalence of mobile search nowadays, the benefits of mobile query recommendation are well recognized, which provide formulated queries sticking to users’ search intent. In this paper, we introduce the problem of query recommendation on mobile devices and model the user-location-query relations with a tensor representation. Unlike previous studies based on tensor decomposition, we study this problem via tensor function learning. That is, we learn the tensor function from the side information of users, locations and queries, and then predict users’ search intent. We develop an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) scheme to solve the introduced problem. We empirically evaluate our approach based on the mobile query dataset from Bing search engine in the city of Beijing, China, and show that our method can outperform several state-of-the-art approaches.

In multi-label learning, each object is represented by a single instance while associated with a set of class labels. Due to the huge (exponential) number of possible label sets for prediction, existing approaches mainly focus on how to exploit label correlations to facilitate the learning process. Nevertheless, an intrinsic characteristic of learning from multi-label data, i.e. the widely-existing class-imbalance among labels, has not been well investigated. Generally, the number of positive training instances w.r.t. each class label is far less than its negative counterparts, which may lead to performance degradation for most multi-label learning techniques. In this paper, a new multi-label learning approach named Cross-Coupling Aggregation (COCOA) is proposed, which aims at leveraging the exploitation of label correlations as well as the exploration of class-imbalance. Briefly, to induce the predictive model on each class label, one binary-class imbalance learner corresponding to the current label and several multi-class imbalance learners coupling with other labels are aggregated for prediction. Extensive experiments clearly validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, especially in terms of imbalance-specific evaluation metrics such as F-measure and area under the ROC curve.

We address an ensemble clustering problem, where reliable clusters are locally embedded in given multiple partitions. We propose a new nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF)-based method, in which locally reliable clusters are explicitly considered by using instance-wise weights over clusters. Our method factorizes the input cluster assignment matrix into two matrices H and W, which are optimized by iteratively 1) updating H and W while keeping the weight matrix constant and 2) updating the weight matrix while keeping H and W constant, alternatively. The weights in the second step were updated by solving a convex problem, which makes our algorithm significantly faster than existing NMF-based ensemble clustering methods. We empirically proved that our method outperformed a lot of cutting-edge ensemble clustering methods by using a variety of datasets.

Tuning hyper-parameters for large-scale matrix factorization (MF) is very time consuming and sometimes unacceptable. Intuitively, we want to tune hyper-parameters on small sub-matrix sample and then exploit them into the original large-scale matrix. However, most of existing MF methods are scale-variant, which means  the optimal hyper-parameters usually change with the different scale of matrices. To this end, in this paper we propose a scale-invariant parametric MF method, where a set of scale-invariant parameters is defined for model complexity regularization. Therefore, the proposed method can free us from tuning hyper-parameters on large-scale matrix, and achieve a good performance in a more efficient way. Extensive experiments on real-world dataset clearly validate both the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

This paper focuses on human activity recognition (HAR) problem, in which inputs are multichannel time series signals acquired from a set of body-worn inertial sensors and outputs are predefined human activities. In this problem, extracting effective features for identifying activities is a critical but challenging task. Most existing work relies on heuristic hand-crafted feature design and shallow feature learning architectures, which cannot find those distinguishing features to accurately classify different activities. In this paper, we propose a systematic feature learning method for HAR problem. This method adopts a deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to automate feature learning from the raw inputs in a systematic way. Through the deep architecture, the learned features are deemed as the higher level abstract representation of low level raw time series signals. By leveraging the labelled information via supervised learning, the learned features are endowed with more discriminative power. Unified in one model, feature learning and classification are mutually enhanced. All these unique advantages of the CNN make it outperform other HAR algorithms, as verified in the experiments on  the Opportunity Activity Recognition Challenge and other  benchmark datasets.