ABSTRACT The availability of powerful Natural Language Processing techniques led to the emergence of AI tool that reads and interprets unstructured textual information, such as news and social media messages. The sentiment of finance-related content influences trading and investment decisions of players in financial markets and hence, moves the prices of assets. Dr. Svetlana Borovkova has been working for several years in the area of sentiment analysis and its relation to financial markets; applications of sentiment analysis range from commodity trading to systemic risk to quantitative investment strategies. In this talk, Dr. Borovkova will give an overview of this exciting field and show, among other things, how media sentiment can be used to forecast global financial distress, to generate sector and country rotation investment strategies and to help enhance machine learning applications to intraday trading. SPEAKER Dr. Svetlana Borovkova is an Associate Professor of Quantitative Finance in Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Head of Quantitative Modelling in risk advisory firm Probability & Partners.

IBM Watson and Daybreaker hosted the World's First Cognitive Dance Party in San Francisco by using Watson Tone Analyzer, Watson Personality Insights, Chef Watson and Watson Beat. With Personality Insights API Daybreak was able to base the colors, music playlists, kick-off fitness session, healthy breakfast, and intention card all on the each attendees' personality. Tone Analyzer drove the color of a rising cognitive sun based on sentiment analysis of tweets of around the country. While Watson Beat created new riffs using inputs from pianist ELEW, using one or several of his musical filters. Even the Breakfast was courtesy of Chef Watson, which featured unexpected ingredient combinations, tailored again to attendee personality.

Humans use signs, e.g., sentences in a spoken language, for communication and thought. Hence, symbol systems like language are crucial for our communication with other agents and adaptation to our real-world environment. The symbol systems we use in our human society adaptively and dynamically change over time. In the context of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive systems, the symbol grounding problem has been regarded as one of the central problems related to {\it symbols}. However, the symbol grounding problem was originally posed to connect symbolic AI and sensorimotor information and did not consider many interdisciplinary phenomena in human communication and dynamic symbol systems in our society, which semiotics considered. In this paper, we focus on the symbol emergence problem, addressing not only cognitive dynamics but also the dynamics of symbol systems in society, rather than the symbol grounding problem. We first introduce the notion of a symbol in semiotics from the humanities, to leave the very narrow idea of symbols in symbolic AI. Furthermore, over the years, it became more and more clear that symbol emergence has to be regarded as a multifaceted problem. Therefore, secondly, we review the history of the symbol emergence problem in different fields, including both biological and artificial systems, showing their mutual relations. We summarize the discussion and provide an integrative viewpoint and comprehensive overview of symbol emergence in cognitive systems. Additionally, we describe the challenges facing the creation of cognitive systems that can be part of symbol emergence systems.

Multimodal machine learning is a core research area spanning the language, visual and acoustic modalities. The central challenge in multimodal learning involves learning representations that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. In this paper, we propose two methods for unsupervised learning of joint multimodal representations using sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) methods: a \textit{Seq2Seq Modality Translation Model} and a \textit{Hierarchical Seq2Seq Modality Translation Model}. We also explore multiple different variations on the multimodal inputs and outputs of these seq2seq models. Our experiments on multimodal sentiment analysis using the CMU-MOSI dataset indicate that our methods learn informative multimodal representations that outperform the baselines and achieve improved performance on multimodal sentiment analysis, specifically in the Bimodal case where our model is able to improve F1 Score by twelve points. We also discuss future directions for multimodal Seq2Seq methods.

Sentiment analysis is the automated process of understanding an opinion about a given subject from written or spoken language. In a world where we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, sentiment analysis has become a key tool for making sense of that data. This has allowed companies to get key insights and automate all kind of processes. But… How does it work? What are the different approaches? What are its caveats and limitations? How can you use sentiment analysis in your business? Below, you'll find the answers to these questions and everything you need to know about sentiment analysis. No matter if you are an experienced data scientist a coder, a marketer, a product analyst, or if you're just getting started, this comprehensive guide is for you. How Does Sentiment Analysis Work? Sentiment Analysis also known as Opinion Mining is a field within Natural Language Processing (NLP) that builds systems that try to identify and extract opinions within text. Currently, sentiment analysis is a topic of great interest and development since it has many practical applications. Since publicly and privately available information over Internet is constantly growing, a large number of texts expressing opinions are available in review sites, forums, blogs, and social media. With the help of sentiment analysis systems, this unstructured information could be automatically transformed into structured data of public opinions about products, services, brands, politics, or any topic that people can express opinions about. This data can be very useful for commercial applications like marketing analysis, public relations, product reviews, net promoter scoring, product feedback, and customer service. Before going into further details, let's first give a definition of opinion. Text information can be broadly categorized into two main types: facts and opinions. Facts are objective expressions about something. Opinions are usually subjective expressions that describe people's sentiments, appraisals, and feelings toward a subject or topic. In an opinion, the entity the text talks about can be an object, its components, its aspects, its attributes, or its features.

In this paper, we study the problem of data augmentation for language understanding in task-oriented dialogue system. In contrast to previous work which augments an utterance without considering its relation with other utterances, we propose a sequence-to-sequence generation based data augmentation framework that leverages one utterance's same semantic alternatives in the training data. A novel diversity rank is incorporated into the utterance representation to make the model produce diverse utterances and these diversely augmented utterances help to improve the language understanding module. Experimental results on the Airline Travel Information System dataset and a newly created semantic frame annotation on Stanford Multi-turn, Multidomain Dialogue Dataset show that our framework achieves significant improvements of 6.38 and 10.04 F-scores respectively when only a training set of hundreds utterances is represented. Case studies also confirm that our method generates diverse utterances.

Domestic Violence (DV) is considered as big social issue and there exists a strong relationship between DV and health impacts of the public. Existing research studies have focused on social media to track and analyse real world events like emerging trends, natural disasters, user sentiment analysis, political opinions, and health care. However there is less attention given on social welfare issues like DV and its impact on public health. Recently, the victims of DV turned to social media platforms to express their feelings in the form of posts and seek the social and emotional support, for sympathetic encouragement, to show compassion and empathy among public. But, it is difficult to mine the actionable knowledge from large conversational datasets from social media due to the characteristics of high dimensions, short, noisy, huge volume, high velocity, and so on. Hence, this paper will propose a novel framework to model and discover the various themes related to DV from the public domain. The proposed framework would possibly provide unprecedentedly valuable information to the public health researchers, national family health organizations, government and public with data enrichment and consolidation to improve the social welfare of the community. Thus provides actionable knowledge by monitoring and analysing continuous and rich user generated content.

There's lots of great projects in Reddit in sentiment analysis, but almost all of the work I've seen focuses on individual posts, as if tweets or reddit comments was simply a list of thumbs up and thumbs down about issues. For example, context, which doesn't seem to get much discussion. One very basic example where this is important: a Reddit comment that itself is booing a negative comment is considered negative. Of course, the nested "negative" comment should actually be counted in favor of the original topic. The relevant fields in NLP would be coreference, and possibly other subfields involving semantics.

Classic Topic Models are built under the Bag Of Words assumption, in which word position is ignored for simplicity. Besides, symmetric priors are typically used in most applications. In order to easily learn topics with different properties among the same corpus, we propose a new line of work in which the paragraph structure is exploited. Our proposal is based on the following assumption: in many text document corpora there are formal constraints shared across all the collection, e.g. sections. When this assumption is satisfied, some paragraphs may be related to general concepts shared by all documents in the corpus, while others would contain the genuine description of documents. Assuming each paragraph can be semantically more general, specific, or hybrid, we look for ways to measure this, transferring this distinction to topics and being able to learn what we call specific and general topics. Experiments show that this is a proper methodology to highlight certain paragraphs in structured documents at the same time we learn interesting and more diverse topics.

The online environment has provided a great opportunity for insurance policyholders to share their complaints with respect to different services. These complaints can reveal valuable information for insurance companies who seek to improve their services; however, analyzing a huge number of online complaints is a complicated task for human and must involve computational methods to create an efficient process. This research proposes a computational approach to characterize the major topics of a large number of online complaints. Our approach is based on using the topic modeling approach to disclose the latent semantic of complaints. The proposed approach deployed on thousands of GEICO negative reviews. Analyzing 1,371 GEICO complaints indicates that there are 30 major complains in four categories: (1) customer service, (2) insurance coverage, paperwork, policy, and reports, (3) legal issues, and (4) costs, estimates, and payments. This research approach can be used in other applications to explore a large number of reviews.