Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from written language. It is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing and is also widely studied in data mining, Web mining, and text mining. In fact, this research has spread outside of computer science to the management sciences and social sciences due to its importance to business and society as a whole. The growing importance of sentiment analysis coincides with the growth of social media such as reviews, forum discussions, blogs, micro-blogs, Twitter, and social networks. For the first time in human history, we now have a huge volume of opinionated data recorded in digital form for analysis. Sentiment analysis systems are being applied in almost every business and social domain because opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key influencers of our behaviors. Our beliefs and perceptions of reality, and the choices we make, are largely conditioned on how others see and evaluate the world. For this reason, when we need to make a decision we often seek out the opinions of others. This is true not only for individuals but also for organizations. This book is a comprehensive introductory and survey text. It covers all important topics and the latest developments in the field with over 400 references. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners who are interested in social media analysis in general and sentiment analysis in particular. Lecturers can readily use it in class for courses on natural language processing, social media analysis, text mining, and data mining. Lecture slides are also available online.

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Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining

Textual information in the world can be broadly categorized into two main types: facts and opinions. Facts are objective expressions about entities, events and their properties. Opinions are usually subjective expressions that describe people’s sentiments, appraisals or feelings toward entities, events and their properties. The concept of opinion is very broad. In this chapter, we only focus on opinion expressions that convey people’s positive or negative sentiments. Much of the existing research on textual information processing has been focused on mining and retrieval of factual information, e.g., information retrieval, Web search, text classification, text clustering and many other text mining and natural language processing tasks. Little work had been done on the processing of opinions until only recently. Yet, opinions are so important that whenever we need to make a decision we want to hear others’ opinions. This is not only true for individuals but also true for organizations. One of the main reasons for the lack of study on opinions is the fact that there was little opinionated text available before the World Wide Web. Before the Web, when an individual needed to make a decision, he/she typically asked for opinions from friends and families. When an organization wanted to find the opinions or sentiments of the general public about its products and services, it conducted opinion polls, surveys, and focus groups. However, with the Web, especially with the explosive growth of the usergenerated content on the Web in the past few years, the world has been transformed. The Web has dramatically changed the way that people express their views and opinions. They can now post reviews of products at merchant sites and express their views on almost anything in Internet forums, discussion groups, and blogs, which are collectively called the user-generated content. This online wordof-mouth behavior represents new and measurable sources of information with many practical applications. Now if one wants to buy a product, he/she is no longer limited to asking his/her friends and families because there are many product reviews on the Web which give opinions of existing users of the product. For a company, it may no longer be necessary to conduct surveys, organize focus groups or employ external consultants in order to find consumer opinions about its products and those of its competitors because the user-generated content on the Web can already give them such information.

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Sentiment Analysis and Subjectivity

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is the computational study of people’s opinions, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions toward entities, individuals, issues, events, topics and their attributes. The task is technically challenging and practically very useful. For example, businesses always want to find public or consumer opinions about their products and services. Potential customers also want to know the opinions of existing users before they use a service or purchase a product.

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A Survey of Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis

The Web holds valuable, vast, and unstructured information about public opinion. Here, the history, current use, and future of opinion mining and sentiment analysis are discussed, along with relevant techniques and tools.

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New Avenues in Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis

The boom of product review websites, blogs and forums on the web has attracted many research efforts on opinion mining. Recently, there was a growing interest in the finer-grained opinion mining, which detects opinions on different review features as opposed to the whole review level. The researches on feature-level opinion mining mainly rely on identifying the explicit relatedness between product feature words and opinion words in reviews. However, the sentiment relatedness between the two objects is usually complicated. For many cases, product feature words are implied by the opinion words in reviews. The detection of such hidden sentiment association is still a big challenge in opinion mining. Especially, it is an even harder task of feature-level opinion mining on Chinese reviews due to the nature of Chinese language. In this paper, we propose a novel mutual reinforcement approach to deal with the feature-level opinion mining problem. More specially, 1) the approach clusters product features and opinion words simultaneously and iteratively by fusing both their content information and sentiment link information. 2) under the same framework, based on the product feature categories and opinion word groups, we construct the sentiment association set between the two groups of data objects by identifying their strongest n sentiment links. Moreover, knowledge from multi-source is incorporated to enhance clustering in the procedure. Based on the pre-constructed association set, our approach can largely predict opinions relating to different product features, even for the case without the explicit appearance of product feature words in reviews. Thus it provides a more accurate opinion evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-art algorithms.

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Hidden sentiment association in chinese web opinion mining

In recent years, the number of freely available online reviews is increasing at a high speed. Aspect-based opinion mining technique has been employed to find out reviewers' opinions toward different product aspects. Such finer-grained opinion mining is valuable for the potential customers to make their purchase decisions. Product-feature extraction and categorization is very important for better mining aspect-oriented opinions. Since people usually use different words to describe the same aspect in the reviews, product-feature extraction and categorization becomes more challenging. Manually product-feature extraction and categorization is tedious and time consuming, and practically infeasible for the massive amount of products. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised product-feature categorization method with multilevel latent semantic association. After extracting product-features from the semi-structured reviews, we construct the first latent semantic association (LaSA) model to group words into a set of concepts according to their virtual context documents. It generates the latent semantic structure for each product-feature. The second LaSA model is constructed to categorize the product-features according to their latent semantic structures and context snippets in the reviews. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better performance compared with the existing approaches. Moreover, the proposed method is language- and domain-independent.

Product feature categorization with multilevel latent semantic association

Domain adaptation is an important problem in named entity recognition (NER). NER classifiers usually lose accuracy in the domain transfer due to the different data distribution between the source and the target domains. The major reason for performance degrading is that each entity type often has lots of domain-specific term representations in the different domains. The existing approaches usually need an amount of labeled target domain data for tuning the original model. However, it is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task to build annotated training data set for every target domain. We present a domain adaptation method with latent semantic association (LaSA). This method effectively overcomes the data distribution difference without leveraging any labeled target domain data. LaSA model is constructed to capture latent semantic association among words from the unlabeled corpus. It groups words into a set of concepts according to the related context snippets. In the domain transfer, the original term spaces of both domains are projected to a concept space using LaSA model at first, then the original NER model is tuned based on the semantic association features. Experimental results on English and Chinese corpus show that LaSA-based domain adaptation significantly enhances the performance of NER.

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Domain Adaptation with Latent Semantic Association for Named Entity Recognition

Opinion mining focuses on extracting customers' opinions from the reviews and predicting their sentiment orientation. Reviewers usually praise a product in some aspects and bemoan it in other aspects. With the business globalization, it is very important for enterprises to extract the opinions toward different aspects and find out cross-lingual/cross-culture difference in opinions. Cross-lingual opinion mining is a very challenging task as amounts of opinions are written in different languages, and not well structured. Since people usually use different words to describe the same aspect in the reviews, product-feature (PF) categorization becomes very critical in cross-lingual opinion mining. Manual cross-lingual PF categorization is time consuming, and practically infeasible for the massive amount of data written in different languages. In order to effectively find out cross-lingual difference in opinions, we present an aspect-oriented opinion mining method with Cross-lingual Latent Semantic Association (CLaSA). We first construct CLaSA model to learn the cross-lingual latent semantic association among all the PFs from multi-dimension semantic clues in the review corpus. Then we employ CLaSA model to categorize all the multilingual PFs into semantic aspects, and summarize cross-lingual difference in opinions towards different aspects. Experimental results show that our method achieves better performance compared with the existing approaches. With CLaSA model, our text mining system OpinionIt can effectively discover cross-lingual difference in opinions.

OpinionIt: a text mining system for cross-lingual opinion analysis

This invention aims to provide a method and apparatus for displaying and/or browsing a multi-faceted data set containing hierarchical subject labels. In the present invention, subject labels can be located into a 3D space. Complex information, such as, the relationship between subject labels and weights of respective subject labels can be presented by displaying the 3D space. In this way, the screen size can be reduced and the user experience is improved.

Zhili Guo

Papers

Hidden sentiment association in chinese web opinion mining

Product feature categorization with multilevel latent semantic association

Domain Adaptation with Latent Semantic Association for Named Entity Recognition

OpinionIt: a text mining system for cross-lingual opinion analysis

Method and device for displaying and browsing a multi-faceted data set