Discourse & Dialogue
Call Center Sentiment Analysis -- Hack to Empathetic Customer Service
Call Center sentiment analysis is the processing of data by identifying the natural nuance of customer context and analyzing data to make customer service more empathetic. If you are employed in Call Center, the following scenario might be familiar: You get a call from a client and hear their words with stress. The cause for such a cataclysmic reaction: They got a bad rating for their products or business. Some of those reviews might be negative, formal, and neutral. Knowing what someone meant can be tricky unless you understand their emotional quotient.
CATs are Fuzzy PETs: A Corpus and Analysis of Potentially Euphemistic Terms
Gavidia, Martha, Lee, Patrick, Feldman, Anna, Peng, Jing
Euphemisms have not received much attention in natural language processing, despite being an important element of polite and figurative language. Euphemisms prove to be a difficult topic, not only because they are subject to language change, but also because humans may not agree on what is a euphemism and what is not. Nevertheless, the first step to tackling the issue is to collect and analyze examples of euphemisms. We present a corpus of potentially euphemistic terms (PETs) along with example texts from the GloWbE corpus. Additionally, we present a subcorpus of texts where these PETs are not being used euphemistically, which may be useful for future applications. We also discuss the results of multiple analyses run on the corpus. Firstly, we find that sentiment analysis on the euphemistic texts supports that PETs generally decrease negative and offensive sentiment. Secondly, we observe cases of disagreement in an annotation task, where humans are asked to label PETs as euphemistic or not in a subset of our corpus text examples. We attribute the disagreement to a variety of potential reasons, including if the PET was a commonly accepted term (CAT).
A Holistic Framework for Analyzing the COVID-19 Vaccine Debate
Pacheco, Maria Leonor, Islam, Tunazzina, Mahajan, Monal, Shor, Andrey, Yin, Ming, Ungar, Lyle, Goldwasser, Dan
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to infodemic of low quality information leading to poor health decisions. Combating the outcomes of this infodemic is not only a question of identifying false claims, but also reasoning about the decisions individuals make. In this work we propose a holistic analysis framework connecting stance and reason analysis, and fine-grained entity level moral sentiment analysis. We study how to model the dependencies between the different level of analysis and incorporate human insights into the learning process. Experiments show that our framework provides reliable predictions even in the low-supervision settings.
Learn from Structural Scope: Improving Aspect-Level Sentiment Analysis with Hybrid Graph Convolutional Networks
Xu, Lvxiaowei, Pang, Xiaoxuan, Wu, Jianwang, Cai, Ming, Peng, Jiawei
Aspect-level sentiment analysis aims to determine the sentiment polarity towards a specific target in a sentence. The main challenge of this task is to effectively model the relation between targets and sentiments so as to filter out noisy opinion words from irrelevant targets. Most recent efforts capture relations through target-sentiment pairs or opinion spans from a word-level or phrase-level perspective. Based on the observation that targets and sentiments essentially establish relations following the grammatical hierarchy of phrase-clause-sentence structure, it is hopeful to exploit comprehensive syntactic information for better guiding the learning process. Therefore, we introduce the concept of Scope, which outlines a structural text region related to a specific target. To jointly learn structural Scope and predict the sentiment polarity, we propose a hybrid graph convolutional network (HGCN) to synthesize information from constituency tree and dependency tree, exploring the potential of linking two syntax parsing methods to enrich the representation. Experimental results on four public datasets illustrate that our HGCN model outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines.
Researchers Come Closer to Achieving "Emotionally Intelligent" AI
"Multimodal sentiment analysis" is a group of methods making up the gold standard for AI dialog systems with sentiment detection, and they can automatically analyze a person's psychological state from their speech, facial expressions, voice color, and posture. They are fundamental to creating human-centered AI systems and could lead to the development of an emotionally intelligent AI with "beyond-human capabilities." These capabilities would help the AI understand the user's sentiment before forming an appropriate response.
Understand your Customer Better with Sentiment Analysis
Originally published on Towards AI the World's Leading AI and Technology News and Media Company. If you are building an AI-related product or service, we invite you to consider becoming an AI sponsor. At Towards AI, we help scale AI and technology startups. Let us help you unleash your technology to the masses. "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."
Global Big Data Conference
The multimodal neural network is used to predict user sentiment from multimodal features such as text, audio, and visual data. Speech and language recognition technology is a rapidly developing field, which has led to the emergence of novel speech dialog systems, such as Amazon Alexa and Siri. A significant milestone in the development of dialog artificial intelligence (AI) systems is the addition of emotional intelligence. A system able to recognize the emotional states of the user, in addition to understanding language, would generate a more empathetic response, leading to a more immersive experience for the user. "Multimodal sentiment analysis" is a group of methods that constitute the gold standard for an AI dialog system with sentiment detection.
Parameter-Efficient Abstractive Question Answering over Tables or Text
Pal, Vaishali, Kanoulas, Evangelos, de Rijke, Maarten
A long-term ambition of information seeking QA systems is to reason over multi-modal contexts and generate natural answers to user queries. Today, memory intensive pre-trained language models are adapted to downstream tasks such as QA by fine-tuning the model on QA data in a specific modality like unstructured text or structured tables. To avoid training such memory-hungry models while utilizing a uniform architecture for each modality, parameter-efficient adapters add and train small task-specific bottle-neck layers between transformer layers. In this work, we study parameter-efficient abstractive QA in encoder-decoder models over structured tabular data and unstructured textual data using only 1.5% additional parameters for each modality. We also ablate over adapter layers in both encoder and decoder modules to study the efficiency-performance trade-off and demonstrate that reducing additional trainable parameters down to 0.7%-1.0% leads to comparable results. Our models out-perform current state-of-the-art models on tabular QA datasets such as Tablesum and FeTaQA, and achieve comparable performance on a textual QA dataset such as NarrativeQA using significantly less trainable parameters than fine-tuning.
A Joint Learning Approach for Semi-supervised Neural Topic Modeling
Chiu, Jeffrey, Mittal, Rajat, Tumma, Neehal, Sharma, Abhishek, Doshi-Velez, Finale
Topic models are some of the most popular ways to represent textual data in an interpret-able manner. Recently, advances in deep generative models, specifically auto-encoding variational Bayes (AEVB), have led to the introduction of unsupervised neural topic models, which leverage deep generative models as opposed to traditional statistics-based topic models. We extend upon these neural topic models by introducing the Label-Indexed Neural Topic Model (LI-NTM), which is, to the extent of our knowledge, the first effective upstream semi-supervised neural topic model. We find that LI-NTM outperforms existing neural topic models in document reconstruction benchmarks, with the most notable results in low labeled data regimes and for data-sets with informative labels; furthermore, our jointly learned classifier outperforms baseline classifiers in ablation studies.