Despite end-to-end neural systems making significant progress in the last decade for task-oriented as well as chit-chat based dialogue systems, most dialogue systems rely on hybrid approaches which use a combination of rule-based, retrieval and generative approaches for generating a set of ranked responses. Such dialogue systems need to rely on a fallback mechanism to respond to out-of-domain or novel user queries which are not answerable within the scope of the dialog system. While, dialog systems today rely on static and unnatural responses like "I don't know the answer to that question" or "I'm not sure about that", we design a neural approach which generates responses which are contextually aware with the user query as well as say no to the user. Such customized responses provide paraphrasing ability and contextualization as well as improve the interaction with the user and reduce dialogue monotonicity. Our simple approach makes use of rules over dependency parses and a text-to-text transformer fine-tuned on synthetic data of question-response pairs generating highly relevant, grammatical as well as diverse questions. We perform automatic and manual evaluations to demonstrate the efficacy of the system.

Discourse information, as postulated by popular discourse theories, such as RST and PDTB, has been shown to improve an increasing number of downstream NLP tasks, showing positive effects and synergies of discourse with important real-world applications. While methods for incorporating discourse become more and more sophisticated, the growing need for robust and general discourse structures has not been sufficiently met by current discourse parsers, usually trained on small scale datasets in a strictly limited number of domains. This makes the prediction for arbitrary tasks noisy and unreliable. The overall resulting lack of high-quality, high-quantity discourse trees poses a severe limitation to further progress. In order the alleviate this shortcoming, we propose a new strategy to generate tree structures in a task-agnostic, unsupervised fashion by extending a latent tree induction framework with an auto-encoding objective. The proposed approach can be applied to any tree-structured objective, such as syntactic parsing, discourse parsing and others. However, due to the especially difficult annotation process to generate discourse trees, we initially develop a method to generate larger and more diverse discourse treebanks. In this paper we are inferring general tree structures of natural text in multiple domains, showing promising results on a diverse set of tasks.

In the sentiment analysis task, predicting the sentiment tendency of a sentence is an important branch. Previous research focused more on sentiment analysis in English, for example, analyzing the sentiment tendency of sentences based on Valence, Arousal, Dominance of sentences. the emotional tendency is different between the two languages. For example, the sentence order between Chinese and English may present different emotions. This paper tried a method that builds a domain-specific lexicon. In this way, the model can classify Chinese words with emotional tendency. In this approach, based on the [13], an ultra-dense space embedding table is trained through word embedding of Chinese TikTok review and emotional lexicon sources(seed words). The result of the model is a domain-specific lexicon, which presents the emotional tendency of words. I collected Chinese TikTok comments as training data. By comparing The training results with the PCA method to evaluate the performance of the model in Chinese sentiment classification, the results show that the model has done well in Chinese. The source code has released on github:https://github.com/h2222/douyin_comment_dataset

To understand the important dimensions of service quality from the passenger's perspective and tailor service offerings for competitive advantage, airlines can capitalize on the abundantly available online customer reviews (OCR). The objective of this paper is to discover company- and competitor-specific intelligence from OCR using an unsupervised text analytics approach. First, the key aspects (or topics) discussed in the OCR are extracted using three topic models - probabilistic latent semantic analysis (pLSA) and two variants of Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA-VI and LDA-GS). Subsequently, we propose an ensemble-assisted topic model (EA-TM), which integrates the individual topic models, to classify each review sentence to the most representative aspect. Likewise, to determine the sentiment corresponding to a review sentence, an ensemble sentiment analyzer (E-SA), which combines the predictions of three opinion mining methods (AFINN, SentiStrength, and VADER), is developed. An aspect-based opinion summary (AOS), which provides a snapshot of passenger-perceived strengths and weaknesses of an airline, is established by consolidating the sentiments associated with each aspect. Furthermore, a bi-gram analysis of the labeled OCR is employed to perform root cause analysis within each identified aspect. A case study involving 99,147 airline reviews of a US-based target carrier and four of its competitors is used to validate the proposed approach. The results indicate that a cost- and time-effective performance summary of an airline and its competitors can be obtained from OCR. Finally, besides providing theoretical and managerial implications based on our results, we also provide implications for post-pandemic preparedness in the airline industry considering the unprecedented impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and predictions on similar pandemics in the future.

Background: Misinformation spread through social media is a growing problem, and the emergence of COVID-19 has caused an explosion in new activity and renewed focus on the resulting threat to public health. Given this increased visibility, in-depth analysis of COVID-19 misinformation spread is critical to understanding the evolution of ideas with potential negative public health impact. Methods: Using a curated data set of COVID-19 tweets (N ~120 million tweets) spanning late January to early May 2020, we applied methods including regular expression filtering, supervised machine learning, sentiment analysis, geospatial analysis, and dynamic topic modeling to trace the spread of misinformation and to characterize novel features of COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Results: Random forest models for four major misinformation topics provided mixed results, with narrowly-defined conspiracy theories achieving F1 scores of 0.804 and 0.857, while more broad theories performed measurably worse, with scores of 0.654 and 0.347. Despite this, analysis using model-labeled data was beneficial for increasing the proportion of data matching misinformation indicators. We were able to identify distinct increases in negative sentiment, theory-specific trends in geospatial spread, and the evolution of conspiracy theory topics and subtopics over time. Conclusions: COVID-19 related conspiracy theories show that history frequently repeats itself, with the same conspiracy theories being recycled for new situations. We use a combination of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and natural language processing techniques to look at the evolution of theories over the first four months of the COVID-19 outbreak, how these theories intertwine, and to hypothesize on more effective public health messaging to combat misinformation in online spaces.

A "sentiment" is a generally binary opposition in opinions and expresses the feelings in the form of emotions, attitudes, opinions, and so on. It can express many opinions. By using machine learning methods and natural language processing, we can extract the personal information of a document and attempt to classify it according to its polarity, such as positive, neutral, or negative, making sentiment analysis instrumental in determining the overall opinion of a defined objective, for instance, a selling item or predicting stock markets for a given company. Sentiment analysis is challenging and far from being solved since most languages are highly complex (objectivity, subjectivity, negation, vocabulary, grammar, and others). However, that is what makes it exciting to working on [1].

We live in a world which is more opinionated than ever. Any service that we consume leaves us either satisfied or unsatisfied. And with the advent of social media, we make our views public in no time. Vast sources of data are available in the form of reviews, customer satisfaction surveys, customer complaints, etc. Businesses can use this data to understand what customers are talking about, and make data driven decisions to improve their services. Let's talk in terms of Machine Learning now! Sentiment Analysis is the process of understanding how satisfied customers are w.r.t. a service.

There are several articles detailing beneficial Data Science libraries, as well as packages, platforms, and modules, so I am going to do my best in choosing not only the top libraries, but also ones that are unique in order to reduce redundancies. As a professional Data Scientist, I have not only heard that the data part of the process consumes up a lot of your time in everyday work, but I have also experienced it. Additionally, I have worked not just with numeric data, but also with text data, which requires a lot of preprocessing and can be helped by libraries like nltk, textblob, and pyldavis. Lastly, some of these libraries work well as visualizations tools as well like networkx. Below, I will be discussing an overview and specific benefits, some code on installations, and some examples of how to use these beneficial libraries.

Prediction and quantification of future volatility and returns play an important role in financial modelling, both in portfolio optimization and risk management. Natural language processing today allows to process news and social media comments to detect signals of investors' confidence. We have explored the relationship between sentiment extracted from financial news and tweets and FTSE100 movements. We investigated the strength of the correlation between sentiment measures on a given day and market volatility and returns observed the next day. The findings suggest that there is evidence of correlation between sentiment and stock market movements: the sentiment captured from news headlines could be used as a signal to predict market returns; the same does not apply for volatility. Also, in a surprising finding, for the sentiment found in Twitter comments we obtained a correlation coefficient of -0.7, and p-value below 0.05, which indicates a strong negative correlation between positive sentiment captured from the tweets on a given day and the volatility observed the next day. We developed an accurate classifier for the prediction of market volatility in response to the arrival of new information by deploying topic modelling, based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation, to extract feature vectors from a collection of tweets and financial news. The obtained features were used as additional input to the classifier. Thanks to the combination of sentiment and topic modelling our classifier achieved a directional prediction accuracy for volatility of 63%.

This section serves as a short reminder on what we are trying to do. CareerVillage, in its essence, is like Stackoverflow or Quora but for career questions. Users can post questions about any careers like computer science, pharmacology, aerospace engineering etc, and volunteer professionals try their best to answer the questions. When a new question comes in, CareerVillage recommends that question to a specific professional who is suitable to answer that question. In order to maximize the chance that a user's questions get answered, CareerVillage needs to send the right question to the most apt professional.