Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

The automated categorization (or classification) of texts into predefined categories has witnessed a booming interest in the last 10 years, due to the increased availability of documents in digital form and the ensuing need to organize them. In the research community the dominant approach to this problem is based on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of preclassified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The advantages of this approach over the knowledge engineering approach (consisting in the manual definition of a classifier by domain experts) are a very good effectiveness, considerable savings in terms of expert labor power, and straightforward portability to different domains. This survey discusses the main approaches to text categorization that fall within the machine learning paradigm. We will discuss in detail issues pertaining to three different problems, namely, document representation, classifier construction, and classifier evaluation.

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Machine learning in automated text categorization

An important part of our information-gathering behavior has always been to find out what other people think. With the growing availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs, new opportunities and challenges arise as people now can, and do, actively use information technologies to seek out and understand the opinions of others. The sudden eruption of activity in the area of opinion mining and sentiment analysis, which deals with the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment, and subjectivity in text, has thus occurred at least in part as a direct response to the surge of interest in new systems that deal directly with opinions as a first-class object.

This survey covers techniques and approaches that promise to directly enable opinion-oriented information-seeking systems. Our focus is on methods that seek to address the new challenges raised by sentiment-aware applications, as compared to those that are already present in more traditional fact-based analysis. We include material on summarization of evaluative text and on broader issues regarding privacy, manipulation, and economic impact that the development of opinion-oriented information-access services gives rise to. To facilitate future work, a discussion of available resources, benchmark datasets, and evaluation campaigns is also provided.

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Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis

Part I: AN INTRODUCTION TO INQUIRY. 1. Human Inquiry and Science. 2. Paradigms, Theory, and Research. 3. The Ethics and Politics of Social Research. Part II: THE STRUCTURING OF INQUIRY: QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE. 4. Research Design. 5. Conceptualization, Operationalization, and Measurement. 6. Indexes, Scales, and Typologies. 7. The Logic of Sampling. Part III: MODES OF OBSERVATION: QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE. 8. Experiments. 9. Survey Research. 10. Qualitative Field Research. 11. Unobtrusive Research. 12. Evaluation Research. Part IV: ANALYSIS OF DATA:QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE . 13. Qualitative Data Analysis. 14. Quantitative Data Analysis. 15. Reading and Writing Social Research. Appendix A. Using the Library. Appendix B. Random Numbers. Appendix C. Distribution of Chi Square. Appendix D. Normal Curve Areas. Appendix E. Estimated Sampling Error.

社会研究方法基础 = The Basics of Social Research

Ease of browsing and searching for information on mobile devices has been an area of increasing interest in the information retrieval (IR) research community. While some work has been done to enhance the usability of handwriting recognition to input queries, the characteristics of speech as an input mechanism have not been extensively studied. It is intuitive to think that users would speak more words when issuing their queries due to the ease of speech when they are enabled to form queries via voice to an information retrieval system than forming queries in written form. Is this in fact the case in reality? This paper presents some new findings derived from an experimental study to test this intuition, and assesses the feasibility of the spoken queries for the search purposes.

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Spoken versus Written Queries for Mobile Information Access

Social media have become a popular platform for people to share their opinions and emotions. Analyzing opinions that are posted on the web is very important since they influence future decisions of organizations and people. Comparative opinion mining is a subfield of opinion mining that deals with identifying and extracting information that is expressed in a comparative form. Due to the fact that there is a huge amount of opinions posted online everyday, analyzing comparative opinions from a temporal perspective is an important application that needs to be explored. This study introduces the idea of integrating temporal elements in comparative opinion mining. Different type of results can be obtained from the temporal analysis, including trend analysis, competitive analysis as well as burst detection. In our study we show that temporal analysis of comparative opinion mining provides more current and relevant information to users compared to standard opinion mining.

Temporal Analysis of Comparative Opinion Mining

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval, ICTIR 2011, held in Bertinoro, Italy, in September 2011. The 25 revised full papers and 13 short papers presented together with the abstracts of two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. The papers cover topics ranging from query expansion, co-occurence analysis, user and interactive modelling, system performance prediction and comparison, and probabilistic approaches for ranking and modelling IR to topics related to interdisciplinary approaches or applications. They are organized into the following topical sections: predicting query performance; latent semantic analysis and word co-occurrence analysis; query expansion and re-ranking; comparison of information retrieval systems and approximate search; probability ranking principle and alternatives; interdisciplinary approaches; user and relevance; result diversification and query disambiguation; and logical operators and descriptive approaches.

Advances in information retrieval theory : Third International Conference, ICTIR 2011, Bertinoro, Italy, September 12-14, 2011 : proceedings

The 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval took place from the 20th to the 23rd of March 2016 in Padua, Italy. This report summarizes the conference in terms of the presented keynotes, scientific and social programme, industry day, tutorials, workshops and student support.

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Report on ECIR 2016: 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval

The advent of social media has given the opportunity to users to publicly express and share their opinion about any topic. Public opinion is very important for the interested entities that can leverage such information in the process of making decisions. In addition, identifying sentiment changes and the likely causes that have triggered them allows interested parties to adjust their strategies and attract more positive sentiment. With the aim to facilitate research on this problem, we describe a collection of tweets that can be used for detecting and ranking the likely triggers of sentiment spikes towards different entities. To build the collection, we first group tweets by topic which are then manually annotated according to sentiment polarity and strength. We believe that this collection can be useful for further research on detecting sentiment change triggers, sentiment analysis and sentiment prediction.

Fabio Crestani

Papers

Spoken versus Written Queries for Mobile Information Access

Temporal Analysis of Comparative Opinion Mining

Advances in information retrieval theory : Third International Conference, ICTIR 2011, Bertinoro, Italy, September 12-14, 2011 : proceedings

Report on ECIR 2016: 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval

A Collection for Detecting Triggers of Sentiment Spikes