Discourse & Dialogue
Sentiment Analysis by Joint Learning of Word Embeddings and Classifier
Sarma, Prathusha Kameswara, Sethares, Bill
Word embeddings are representations of individual words of a text document in a vector space and they are often use- ful for performing natural language pro- cessing tasks. Current state of the art al- gorithms for learning word embeddings learn vector representations from large corpora of text documents in an unsu- pervised fashion. This paper introduces SWESA (Supervised Word Embeddings for Sentiment Analysis), an algorithm for sentiment analysis via word embeddings. SWESA leverages document label infor- mation to learn vector representations of words from a modest corpus of text doc- uments by solving an optimization prob- lem that minimizes a cost function with respect to both word embeddings as well as classification accuracy. Analysis re- veals that SWESA provides an efficient way of estimating the dimension of the word embeddings that are to be learned. Experiments on several real world data sets show that SWESA has superior per- formance when compared to previously suggested approaches to word embeddings and sentiment analysis tasks.
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No - you can't call it a good model. In the domain you are talking about, we are more interested in catching a true churner than catching a true non-churner. Now from your data you can find - if you use the 0.8 as the cutoff - what %of true churners you correctly predict (true ve) and what % of true non-churners you wrongly label as churners (false ve). ROC tells you, what should be your cutoff and to get there how much false ve you need to tolerate.
Sentiment Analysis: Overview, Applications and Benefits
Mining such data to determine how people feel about your product, brand, or service, is called Sentiment Analysis. When applied to social media channels, it can be used to identify spikes in sentiment, thereby allowing you to identify potential product advocates or social media influencers. Companies such as Microsoft, IBM and smaller emerging companies offer REST APIs that integrate easily with your existing software applications. For example, using the following publicly available Sentiment Analysis REST API from a small start-up called Social Opinion, we pass in the text, "this phone is awesome", to the following URL: In the response, we can see the text has been identified as expressing positive emotion, with a 64% probability of that being true.
A network approach to topic models
Gerlach, Martin, Peixoto, Tiago P., Altmann, Eduardo G.
One of the main computational and scientific challenges in the modern age is to extract useful information from unstructured texts. Topic models are one popular machine-learning approach which infers the latent topical structure of a collection of documents. Despite their success --- in particular of its most widely used variant called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) --- and numerous applications in sociology, history, and linguistics, topic models are known to suffer from severe conceptual and practical problems, e.g. a lack of justification for the Bayesian priors, discrepancies with statistical properties of real texts, and the inability to properly choose the number of topics. Here, we approach the problem of identifying topical structures by representing text corpora as bipartite networks of documents and words and using methods from community detection in complex networks, in particular stochastic block models (SBM). We show that our SBM-based approach constitutes a more principled and versatile framework for topic modeling solving the intrinsic limitations of Dirichlet-based models through a more general choice of nonparametric priors. It automatically detects the number of topics and hierarchically clusters both the words and documents. In practice, we demonstrate through the analysis of artificial and real corpora that our approach outperforms LDA in terms of statistical model selection.
SenGen: Sentence Generating Neural Variational Topic Model
Nallapati, Ramesh, Melnyk, Igor, Kumar, Abhishek, Zhou, Bowen
We present a new topic model that generates documents by sampling a topic for one whole sentence at a time, and generating the words in the sentence using an RNN decoder that is conditioned on the topic of the sentence. We argue that this novel formalism will help us not only visualize and model the topical discourse structure in a document better, but also potentially lead to more interpretable topics since we can now illustrate topics by sampling representative sentences instead of bag of words or phrases. We present a variational auto-encoder approach for learning in which we use a factorized variational encoder that independently models the posterior over topical mixture vectors of documents using a feed-forward network, and the posterior over topic assignments to sentences using an RNN. Our preliminary experiments on two different datasets indicate early promise, but also expose many challenges that remain to be addressed.
Probabilistic Graphical Models for Credibility Analysis in Evolving Online Communities
One of the major hurdles preventing the full exploitation of information from online communities is the widespread concern regarding the quality and credibility of user-contributed content. Prior works in this domain operate on a static snapshot of the community, making strong assumptions about the structure of the data (e.g., relational tables), or consider only shallow features for text classification. To address the above limitations, we propose probabilistic graphical models that can leverage the joint interplay between multiple factors in online communities --- like user interactions, community dynamics, and textual content --- to automatically assess the credibility of user-contributed online content, and the expertise of users and their evolution with user-interpretable explanation. To this end, we devise new models based on Conditional Random Fields for different settings like incorporating partial expert knowledge for semi-supervised learning, and handling discrete labels as well as numeric ratings for fine-grained analysis. This enables applications such as extracting reliable side-effects of drugs from user-contributed posts in healthforums, and identifying credible content in news communities. Online communities are dynamic, as users join and leave, adapt to evolving trends, and mature over time. To capture this dynamics, we propose generative models based on Hidden Markov Model, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and Brownian Motion to trace the continuous evolution of user expertise and their language model over time. This allows us to identify expert users and credible content jointly over time, improving state-of-the-art recommender systems by explicitly considering the maturity of users. This also enables applications such as identifying helpful product reviews, and detecting fake and anomalous reviews with limited information.
Sentiment Analysis: Overview, Applications and Benefits
When experimenting with machine learning and big data, you may identify data sets that contain streams of text that contain customer reviews, or social media posts where customers (or potential customers) are talking about a product, brand or service that you offer. Mining such data to determine how people feel about your product, brand, or service, is called Sentiment Analysis. People have always had an interest in what people think, or what their opinion is. Since the inception of the internet, increasing numbers of people are using websites and services to express their opinion. With social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, it is becoming feasible to automate and gauge what public opinion is on a given topic, news story, product, or brand.
Prediction-Constrained Training for Semi-Supervised Mixture and Topic Models
Hughes, Michael C., Weiner, Leah, Hope, Gabriel, McCoy, Thomas H. Jr., Perlis, Roy H., Sudderth, Erik B., Doshi-Velez, Finale
Supervisory signals have the potential to make low-dimensional data representations, like those learned by mixture and topic models, more interpretable and useful. We propose a framework for training latent variable models that explicitly balances two goals: recovery of faithful generative explanations of high-dimensional data, and accurate prediction of associated semantic labels. Existing approaches fail to achieve these goals due to an incomplete treatment of a fundamental asymmetry: the intended application is always predicting labels from data, not data from labels. Our prediction-constrained objective for training generative models coherently integrates loss-based supervisory signals while enabling effective semi-supervised learning from partially labeled data. We derive learning algorithms for semi-supervised mixture and topic models using stochastic gradient descent with automatic differentiation. We demonstrate improved prediction quality compared to several previous supervised topic models, achieving predictions competitive with high-dimensional logistic regression on text sentiment analysis and electronic health records tasks while simultaneously learning interpretable topics.
Reward-Balancing for Statistical Spoken Dialogue Systems using Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning
Ultes, Stefan, Budzianowski, Paweł, Casanueva, Iñigo, Mrkšić, Nikola, Rojas-Barahona, Lina, Su, Pei-Hao, Wen, Tsung-Hsien, Gašić, Milica, Young, Steve
Reinforcement learning is widely used for dialogue policy optimization where the reward function often consists of more than one component, e.g., the dialogue success and the dialogue length. In this work, we propose a structured method for finding a good balance between these components by searching for the optimal reward component weighting. To render this search feasible, we use multi-objective reinforcement learning to significantly reduce the number of training dialogues required. We apply our proposed method to find optimized component weights for six domains and compare them to a default baseline.