This work focuses on in-context data augmentation for intent detection. Having found that augmentation via in-context prompting of large pre-trained language models (PLMs) alone does not improve performance, we introduce a novel approach based on PLMs and pointwise V-information (PVI), a metric that can measure the usefulness of a datapoint for training a model. Our method first fine-tunes a PLM on a small seed of training data and then synthesizes new datapoints - utterances that correspond to given intents. It then employs intent-aware filtering, based on PVI, to remove datapoints that are not helpful to the downstream intent classifier. Our method is thus able to leverage the expressive power of large language models to produce diverse training data. Empirical results demonstrate that our method can produce synthetic training data that achieve state-of-the-art performance on three challenging intent detection datasets under few-shot settings (1.28% absolute improvement in 5-shot and 1.18% absolute in 10-shot, on average) and perform on par with the state-of-the-art in full-shot settings (within 0.01% absolute, on average).

Sentiment analysis AKA opinion mining is one of the most widely used NLP applications to identify human intentions from their reviews. In the education sector, opinion mining is used to listen to student opinions and enhance their learning-teaching practices pedagogically. With advancements in sentiment annotation techniques and AI methodologies, student comments can be labelled with their sentiment orientation without much human intervention. In this review article, (1) we consider the role of emotional analysis in education from four levels: document level, sentence level, entity level, and aspect level, (2) sentiment annotation techniques including lexicon-based and corpus-based approaches for unsupervised annotations are explored, (3) the role of AI in sentiment analysis with methodologies like machine learning, deep learning, and transformers are discussed, (4) the impact of sentiment analysis on educational procedures to enhance pedagogy, decision-making, and evaluation are presented. Educational institutions have been widely invested to build sentiment analysis tools and process their student feedback to draw their opinions and insights. Applications built on sentiment analysis of student feedback are reviewed in this study. Challenges in sentiment analysis like multi-polarity, polysemous, negation words, and opinion spam detection are explored and their trends in the research space are discussed. The future directions of sentiment analysis in education are discussed.

Many open-domain dialogue systems rely on multiple response generators, any of which can contribute a response to the dialogue in a particular context. Thus the ability to compare potential responses and then select the best plays an important role in ensuring a dialogue system is coherent and engaging. Dialogue coherence goes beyond simply remaining on topic -- some trivia may be on topic and engaging when mentioned out of the blue, but may not be coherent and grounded in the context of the conversation. We carry out experiments on response selection in the Athena system, an Alexa Prize SocialBot that has dedicated content and multiple topic-specific response generators for a large number of topics. First, we collect a corpus of Athena conversations with live human traffic, where potential responses from all enabled response generators are logged and subsequently annotated for response quality. We compare several off-the-shelf response ranking methods for open-domain dialogue to Athena-Heuristic, a heuristic response ranker that was field-tested in Athena during the third Alexa Prize competition. We also compare these to a transformer-based response ranker we call Athena-RR, that we train on our Athena conversations. Athena-RR uses both the conversational context and the dialogue state to rank the potential responses. We find that Athena-RR with a Recall@1 of 70.79\% outperforms Athena-Heuristic and all of the off-the-shelf rankers by a large margin. We then conduct a live A/B study comparing Athena-Heuristic to Athena-RR in a 6,358 conversations with Alexa users. We show that Athena-RR leads to significantly longer conversations that receive significantly higher user ratings than the heuristic rule-based ranker.

Emotional Support Conversation (ESConv) aims to reduce help-seekers'emotional distress with the supportive strategy and response. It is essential for the supporter to select an appropriate strategy with the feedback of the help-seeker (e.g., emotion change during dialog turns, etc) in ESConv. However, previous methods mainly focus on the dialog history to select the strategy and ignore the help-seeker's feedback, leading to the wrong and user-irrelevant strategy prediction. In addition, these approaches only model the context-to-strategy flow and pay less attention to the strategy-to-context flow that can focus on the strategy-related context for generating the strategy-constrain response. In this paper, we propose a Feedback-Aware Double COntrolling Network (FADO) to make a strategy schedule and generate the supportive response. The core module in FADO consists of a dual-level feedback strategy selector and a double control reader. Specifically, the dual-level feedback strategy selector leverages the turn-level and conversation-level feedback to encourage or penalize strategies. The double control reader constructs the novel strategy-to-context flow for generating the strategy-constrain response. Furthermore, a strategy dictionary is designed to enrich the semantic information of the strategy and improve the quality of strategy-constrain response. Experimental results on ESConv show that the proposed FADO has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both strategy selection and response generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Thedatababbler/FADO.

Language is an important form of data in politics. Constituents express their stances and needs in text such as social media and survey responses. Politicians conduct campaigns through debates, statements of policy positions, and social media. Government staff needs to compile information from various documents to assist in decision-making. Textual data is also prevalent through the documents and debates in the legislation process, negotiations and treaties to resolve international conflicts, and media such as news reports, social media, party platforms, and manifestos. Natural language processing (NLP) is the study of computational methods to automatically analyze text and extract meaningful information for subsequent analysis. The importance of NLP for policymaking has been highlighted since the last century (Gigley, 1993).

AI-Powered Solutions for Patient sentiment analysis system to improve the patient experience. Currently, the client is using generic Google NLP. We are based out of the USA in Austin, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, and New york.

This chapter presents a practical guide for conducting Sentiment Analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in the domain of tick-borne disease text. The aim is to demonstrate the process of how the presence of bias in the discourse surrounding chronic manifestations of the disease can be evaluated. The goal is to use a dataset of 5643 abstracts collected from scientific journals on the topic of chronic Lyme disease to demonstrate using Python, the steps for conducting sentiment analysis using pre-trained language models and the process of validating the preliminary results using both interpretable machine learning tools, as well as a novel methodology of using emerging state-of-the-art large language models like ChatGPT. This serves as a useful resource for researchers and practitioners interested in using NLP techniques for sentiment analysis in the medical domain.

Product-related reviews are based on users' experiences that are mostly shared on videos in YouTube. It is the second most popular website globally in 2021. People prefer to watch videos on recently released products prior to purchasing, in order to gather overall feedback and make worthy decisions. These videos are created by vloggers who are enthusiastic about technical materials and feedback is usually placed by experienced users of the product or its brand. Analyzing the sentiment of the user reviews gives useful insights into the product in general. This study is focused on three smartphone reviews, namely, Apple iPhone 13, Google Pixel 6, and Samsung Galaxy S21 which were released in 2021. VADER, which is a lexicon and rule-based sentiment analysis tool was used to classify each comment to its appropriate positive or negative orientation. All three smartphones show a positive sentiment from the users' perspective and iPhone 13 has the highest number of positive reviews. The resulting models have been tested using N\"aive Bayes, Decision Tree, and Support Vector Machine. Among these three classifiers, Support Vector Machine shows higher accuracies and F1-scores.

Sentiment Analysis Systems (SASs) are data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that, given a piece of text, assign one or more numbers conveying the polarity and emotional intensity expressed in the input. Like other automatic machine learning systems, they have also been known to exhibit model uncertainty where a (small) change in the input leads to drastic swings in the output. This can be especially problematic when inputs are related to protected features like gender or race since such behavior can be perceived as a lack of fairness, i.e., bias. We introduce a novel method to assess and rate SASs where inputs are perturbed in a controlled causal setting to test if the output sentiment is sensitive to protected variables even when other components of the textual input, e.g., chosen emotion words, are fixed. We then use the result to assign labels (ratings) at fine-grained and overall levels to convey the robustness of the SAS to input changes. The ratings serve as a principled basis to compare SASs and choose among them based on behavior. It benefits all users, especially developers who reuse off-the-shelf SASs to build larger AI systems but do not have access to their code or training data to compare.

The unsupervised nature of the models makes them suitable for exploring topics in a corpus without prior knowledge. However, researchers find that these models often fail to measure specific concepts of substantive interest by inadvertently creating multiple topics with similar content and combining distinct themes into a single topic. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that providing a small number of keywords can substantially enhance the measurement performance of topic models. An important advantage of the proposed keyword assisted topic model (keyATM) is that the specification of keywords requires researchers to label topics prior to fitting a model to the data. This contrasts with a widespread practice of post-hoc topic interpretation and adjustments that compromises the objectivity of empirical findings. In our application, we find that keyATM provides more interpretable results, has better document classification performance, and is less sensitive to the number of topics than the standard topic models. Finally, we show that keyATM can also incorporate covariates and model time trends. An open-source software package is available for implementing the proposed methodology. Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RKNNVL