This article was contributed by Mark Edmondson and Peter Meyer, both from IIH Nordic, specialists in online marketing and web communication headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. Many analytics specialists agree that Machine Learning is going to revolutionise the digital analytics industry in the future, as all the major vendors battle to provide Machine Learning APIs that offer to surface interesting features of your data. These APIs offer cloud solutions that you can use to both scale up your own models, or take advantage of pre-trained models. Following our presentation at Superweek Hungary 2017, we wanted to show how you could start using these services today to enhance your own digital analytics capabilities. Among all Machine Learning techniques, we chose Sentiment Analysis since it is a common use case, but the same code with small modifications could be used for any of the machine learning APIs offered by the services we chose, Algorithmia and Google Natural Language API.

Task-oriented dialog systems have been applied in various tasks, such as automated personal assistants, customer service providers and tutors. These systems work well when users have clear and explicit intentions that are well-aligned to the systems' capabilities. However, they fail if users intentions are not explicit. To address this shortcoming, we propose a framework to interleave non-task content (i.e. everyday social conversation) into task conversations. When the task content fails, the system can still keep the user engaged with the non-task content. We trained a policy using reinforcement learning algorithms to promote long-turn conversation coherence and consistency, so that the system can have smooth transitions between task and non-task content. To test the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we developed a movie promotion dialog system. Experiments with human users indicate that a system that interleaves social and task content achieves a better task success rate and is also rated as more engaging compared to a pure task-oriented system.

Some enterprises use Clarabridge to mine customer data, manage customer experience, and see sentiment analysis. While Clarabridge provides an intelligence platform, Signals is a more powerful solution platform in unifying customer voice. While sentiment analysis is a key function of Signals, its deep machine learning capability allows you to do something more organic. It enables you to listen to your customer data from the ground up and identify trends and patterns as they emerge. Signals results are displayed directly in front of the user.

Nested Chinese Restaurant Process (nCRP) topic models are powerful nonparametric Bayesian methods to extract a topic hierarchy from a given text corpus, where the hierarchical structure is automatically determined by the data. Hierarchical Latent Dirichlet Allocation (hLDA) is a popular instance of nCRP topic models. However, hLDA has only been evaluated at small scale, because the existing collapsed Gibbs sampling and instantiated weight variational inference algorithms either are not scalable or sacrifice inference quality with mean-field assumptions. Moreover, an efficient distributed implementation of the data structures, such as dynamically growing count matrices and trees, is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel partially collapsed Gibbs sampling (PCGS) algorithm, which combines the advantages of collapsed and instantiated weight algorithms to achieve good scalability as well as high model quality. An initialization strategy is presented to further improve the model quality. Finally, we propose an efficient distributed implementation of PCGS through vectorization, pre-processing, and a careful design of the concurrent data structures and communication strategy. Empirical studies show that our algorithm is 111 times more efficient than the previous open-source implementation for hLDA, with comparable or even better model quality. Our distributed implementation can extract 1,722 topics from a 131-million-document corpus with 28 billion tokens, which is 4-5 orders of magnitude larger than the previous largest corpus, with 50 machines in 7 hours.

Over this course you will build multiple practical systems using natural language processing (NLP), the branch of machine learning and data science that deals with text and speech. You'll start with a background on NLP before diving in, building a spam detector and a model for sentiment analysis in Python. Learning how to build these practical tools will give you an excellent window into the mechanisms that drive machine learning. Build a spam detector & sentiment analysis model that may be used to predict the stock market Learn practical tools & techniques like the natural language toolkit library & latent semantic analysis Create an article spinner from scratch that can be used as an SEO tool Think this is cool? Check out the other bundles in this series, The Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence Introductory Bundle, and The Advanced Guide to Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Huge volumes of opinion-rich data is user-generated in social media at an unprecedented rate, easing the analysis of individual and public sentiments. Sentiment analysis has shown to be useful in probing and understanding emotions, expressions and attitudes in the text. However, the distinct characteristics of social media data present challenges to traditional sentiment analysis. First, social media data is often noisy, incomplete and fast-evolved which necessitates the design of a sophisticated learning model. Second, sentiment labels are hard to collect which further exacerbates the problem by not being able to discriminate sentiment polarities. Meanwhile, opportunities are also unequivocally presented. Social media contains rich sources of sentiment signals in textual terms and user interactions, which could be helpful in sentiment analysis. While there are some attempts to leverage implicit sentiment signals in positive user interactions, little attention is paid on signed social networks with both positive and negative links. The availability of signed social networks motivates us to investigate if negative links also contain useful sentiment signals. In this paper, we study a novel problem of unsupervised sentiment analysis with signed social networks. In particular, we incorporate explicit sentiment signals in textual terms and implicit sentiment signals from signed social networks into a coherent model SignedSenti for unsupervised sentiment analysis. Empirical experiments on two real-world datasets corroborate its effectiveness.

Sequential data often possesses hierarchical structures with complex dependencies between sub-sequences, such as found between the utterances in a dialogue. To model these dependencies in a generative framework, we propose a neural network-based generative architecture, with stochastic latent variables that span a variable number of time steps. We apply the proposed model to the task of dialogue response generation and compare it with other recent neural-network architectures. We evaluate the model performance through a human evaluation study. The experiments demonstrate that our model improves upon recently proposed models and that the latent variables facilitate both the generation of meaningful, long and diverse responses and maintaining dialogue state.

In this paper, we focus on the task of extracting named entities together with their associated sentiment information in a joint manner. Our key observation in such an entity-level sentiment analysis (a.k.a. targeted sentiment analysis) task is that there exists a sentiment scope within which each named entity is embedded, which largely decides the sentiment information associated with the entity. However, such sentiment scopes are typically not explicitly annotated in the data, and their lengths can be unbounded. Motivated by this, unlike traditional approaches that cast this problem as a simple sequence labeling task, we propose a novel approach that can explicitly model the latent sentiment scopes. Our experiments on the standard datasets demonstrate that our approach is able to achieve better results compared to existing approaches based on conventional conditional random fields (CRFs) and a more recent work based on neural networks.

Cross-domain sentiment classification aims to tag sentiments for a target domain by labeled data from a source domain. Due to the difference between domains, the accuracy of a trained classifier may be very low. In this paper, we propose a boosting-based learning framework named TR-TrAdaBoost for cross-domain sentiment classification. We firstly explore the topic distribution of documents, and then combine it with the unigram TrAdaBoost. The topic distribution captures the domain information of documents, which is valuable for cross-domain sentiment classification. Experimental results indicate that TR-TrAdaBoost represents documents well and boost the performance and robustness of TrAdaBoost.

Structural correspondence learning (SCL) is an effective method for cross-lingual sentiment classification. This approach uses unlabeled documents along with a word translation oracle to automatically induce task specific, cross-lingual correspondences. It transfers knowledge through identifying important features, i.e., pivot features. For simplicity, however, it assumes that the word translation oracle maps each pivot feature in source language to exactly only one word in target language. This one-to-one mapping between words in different languages is too strict. Also the context is not considered at all. In this paper, we propose a cross-lingual SCL based on distributed representation of words; it can learn meaningful one-to-many mappings for pivot words using large amounts of monolingual data and a small dictionary. We conduct experiments on NLP&CC 2013 cross-lingual sentiment analysis dataset, employing English as source language, and Chinese as target language. Our method does not rely on the parallel corpora and the experimental results show that our approach is more competitive than the state-of-the-art methods in cross-lingual sentiment classification.