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In recent years, Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has been a crucial yet challenging task in recognizing textual emotions from text. ABSA has numerous application across various fields, such as social media, commodity review, and movie comment, making it an attractive area of research. Many researchers are working to develop more powerful sentiment analysis models. Currently, most existing ABSA models use the generic pre-trained language models (PLMs) based fine-tuning paradigm, which only utilizes the encoder parameters while discarding the decoder parameters of PLMs. However, this approach fails to leverage the prior knowledge revealed in PLMs effectively. To address these issues, we investigate the potential of the initial pre-training scheme of PLMs to conduct ABSA and thus propose a novel approach in this paper, namely Target Word Transferred ABSA (WordTransABSA). In WordTransABSA, we propose "Word Transferred LM", a novel sequence-level optimization strategy that transferred target words in sentence into pivot tokens to stimulate better PLM semantic understanding capability. Given a sentence with aspect terms as input, WordTransABSA generates contextually appropriate semantics and predicts the affective tokens on the corresponding positions of the aspect terms. The final sentiment polarity of each aspect term is determined through several sentiment identification strategies that we selected. WordTransABSA takes full advantage of the versatile linguistic knowledge of Pre-trained Language Model, resulting in competitive accuracy compared with recent baselines. The WordTransABSA demonstrates its superiority and effectiveness through extensive experiments in both data-sufficient (full-data supervised learning) and data-insufficient (few-shot learning) scenarios. We have made our code publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/albert-jin/WordTransABSA. • We present WordTransABSA, introducing a "Word Transferred LM" strategy for ABSA. • Various strategies are explored for searching sentiment-related pivot tokens. • Data-sufficient/scarce experiments validate the effectiveness of WordTransABSA. • Stimulating PLM pre-training paradigm is proved to be a better solution for ABSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of Online Social Networks offers growing opportunities to examine a number of aspects of the real world and to better understand how human society works at scale. One crucial research direction, constantly evolving over time, concerns the language adopted by users and its impact on online communities. To provide a contribution in this setting, in this paper, we adopt a multi-relational model for social network and identify a new typology of relation, namely co-interest, as an explicit common declaration of engagement towards a given topic among pair of users. Thematic communities can be, hence, derived leveraging such relations. After that, exploiting Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques, we identify and define suitable analysis metrics focusing on the characteristics of the language adopted in such communities. With the objective of analyzing how the adoption of different language may impact the formation of cohesive and strong communities, to make our study general, we consider two very popular and intrinsically different social platforms, namely Twitter and Reddit. The analysis carried out in this paper aims at comparing the two social media to find interesting and novel results about how their users compose textual comments and the corresponding impact on users' interaction. Interestingly, the obtained results show that, although the main factor is related to the popularity of the user generating the content, the characteristics of the adopted language play a non negligible role in the formation of strong communities in social systems. • Investigation about language characteristics of Online Social Networks posts (OSN). • Language analysis to identify the evolution dynamics of online communities. • Correlation between potential post engagement and user adopted language style. • Relationship between the content produced in OSNs and the formation of communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, online social media platforms such as Twitter facilitate the exchange of information among people. However, the prevalence of "infodemic" such as online hate speech has exacerbated social rifts, discrimination, prejudice and even hate crimes. Timely and effective detection of the hate speech will help create a healthy public opinion environment. Most of the current COVID-19-related hate speech research focuses on a single language, such as English. In this paper, we introduce a cross-lingual transfer learning method, aiming to contribute to hate speech detection in low-resource languages. We propose a deep learning based model to classify hate speech with a pre-trained language model for multilingual text embedding. Data augmentation and cross-lingual contrastive learning are then utilized to further improve the performance of cross-lingual knowledge transfer. To evaluate our method, we collected three publicly available annotated COVID-19-related hate speech datasets on Twitter, i.e., two in English and one in German. Furthermore, a Chinese dataset based on Weibo is constructed to expand multilingual data. The experimental results across three languages illustrate the effectiveness of our method for cross-lingual hate speech detection. Test F1-scores of our method for English, Chinese, German as transfer target languages can reach up to 0.728, 0.799 and 0.612 respectively, which are on average better than other baselines. • Suggested a cross-lingual COVID-19-related hate speech detection problem. • Introduced cross-lingual contrastive learning. • Validated model performance on datasets in three languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regret is a universal emotion that arises from sadness, disappointment, or remorse about something that has occurred or that one has done or failed to do in the past. It typically involves wishing that a different decision had been made or that a different action had been taken. Although regret has been studied in various contexts such as psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, its expression and analysis on social media using natural language processing techniques is a relatively recent research topic that warrants further investigation. In this paper, we present a study of regret and its expression on social media platforms. Specifically, we present a novel dataset of Reddit texts that have been classified into three classes: Regret by Action, Regret by Inaction, and No Regret. We then use this dataset to investigate the language used to express regret on Reddit and to identify the domains of text that are most commonly associated with regret. Our findings show that Reddit users are most likely to express regret for past actions, particularly in the domain of relationships. We also found that deep learning models using GloVe embedding outperformed other models in all experiments, indicating the effectiveness of GloVe for representing the meaning and context of words in the domain of regret. Overall, our study provides valuable insights into the nature and prevalence of regret on social media, as well as the potential of deep learning and word embeddings for analyzing and understanding emotional language in online text. These findings have implications for the development of natural language processing algorithms and the design of social media platforms that support emotional expression and communication. • Regret is an emotion that has a significant impact on behavior and decision-making. • Regret is often triggered by actions or inactions in the past. • Reddit's users often regret their actions about relationships in the past. • Effectiveness of GloVe in representing the meaning and context of words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Three datasets are merged to build a larger, more diversified spam dataset. • Data balancing is done using SmoteTomek and NearMiss data resampling techniques. • Proposed Hard and Soft voting ensemble models for performance improvement. • Several DL approaches are experimented with GloVe and FastText word embeddings. • Proposed FCB-SA hybrid DL approach outperformed other DL approaches. Cybercriminals use social media platforms to disseminate spam, misleading facts, fake news, and malicious links. Blocking such deceptive social media spam is essential. However, extracting relevant features from social networks is challenging due to privacy and time constraints. Traditional frequency-based word representation techniques are time-consuming and inefficient in producing contextual word vectors. Word embeddings and deep learning models have recently shown good results in text classification. Also, most existing approaches assumed balanced class distribution, which is false for most real-world datasets. In this paper, an attempt is made to advance the performance of the social spam detection system by leveraging dataset balancing, advanced word embedding techniques, machine learning, and deep learning approaches with the self-attention mechanism. In the proposed framework, the datasets are balanced using NearMiss and SmoteTomek techniques to feed several machine-learning models. Later, the baseline ML models and proposed voting-based ensemble models are evaluated on imbalanced and balanced datasets. For the proposed deep learning-based hybrid approaches, embeddings are generated using GloVe and FastText word embeddings on the balanced combined dataset and passed into the deep neural network comprised of Conv1D and Bi-directional recurrent neural network layers with the self-attention mechanism for improved context understanding and effective results. This study examines hybrid approaches for detecting social spam using imbalanced social network data and picks the optimum combination. Besides, Machine learning ensembles, word embeddings, deep learning with hyper-parameter optimization, and a self-attention method are compared thoroughly. Experiments and comparisons with other techniques show that the proposed hybrid framework with deep learning-based approaches achieves better performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet public social media and forums provide a convenient channel for people concerned about public health issues, such as COVID-19, to share and discuss information/misinformation with each other. In this paper, we propose a natural language processing (NLP) method based on Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) technique to perform sentiment classification and uncover various issues related to COVID-19 public opinions. Bi-LSTM is an improved version of conventional LSTMs for generating the output from both left and right contexts at each time step. We experimented with real datasets extracted from Twitter and Reddit social media platforms, and our experimental results showed improved metrics compared with the conventional LSTM model as well as recent studies available in the literature. The proposed model can be used by official institutions to mitigate the effects of negative messages and to understand peoples' concerns during the pandemic. Furthermore, our findings shed light on the importance of using NLP techniques to analyze public opinion and to combat the spreading of misinformation and to guide health decision-making. • Bi-LSTM sentiment detection model is developed to classify COVID-19 social comments. • Various scenarios to help counter negative COVID-19 comments and reduce their impact. • Comparative analysis of our approach with most popular models is presented. • Word embedding followed by Bi-LSTM provides better performance on Sentiment Analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• New method to semi-automatically build labeled stance detection datasets from Twitter. • Translation strategies outperform zero-shot approaches when data is translated to a high-resourced language. • User-based information helps to label individual tweets. • Our method is applicable to quickly and cheaply generate labeled Twitter-based data. Popular social media networks provide the perfect environment to study the opinions and attitudes expressed by users. While interactions in social media such as Twitter occur in many natural languages, research on stance detection (the position or attitude expressed with respect to a specific topic) within the Natural Language Processing field has largely been done for English. Although some efforts have recently been made to develop annotated data in other languages, there is a telling lack of resources to facilitate multilingual and crosslingual research on stance detection. This is partially due to the fact that manually annotating a corpus of social media texts is a difficult, slow and costly process. Furthermore, as stance is a highly domain- and topic-specific phenomenon, the need for annotated data is specially demanding. As a result, most of the manually labeled resources are hindered by their relatively small size and skewed class distribution. This paper presents a method to obtain multilingual datasets for stance detection in Twitter. Instead of manually annotating on a per tweet basis, we leverage user-based information to semi-automatically label large amounts of tweets. Empirical monolingual and cross-lingual experimentation and qualitative analysis show that our method helps to overcome the aforementioned difficulties to build large, balanced and multilingual labeled corpora. We believe that our method can be easily adapted to easily generate labeled social media data for other Natural Language Processing tasks and domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, due to the great uncontrolled content posted daily on the Web, there has also been a huge increase in the dissemination of hate speech worldwide. Social media, blogs and community forums are examples where people are freely allowed to communicate. However, freedom of expression is not always respectful since offensive or insulting language is sometimes used. Social media companies often rely on users and content moderators to report on this type of content. Nevertheless, due to the large amount of content generated every day on the Web, automatic systems based on Natural Language Processing techniques are required for identifying abusive language online. To date, most of the systems developed to combat this problem are mainly focused on English content, but this issue is a worldwide concern and therefore other languages such as Spanish are involved. In this paper, we address the task of Spanish hate speech identification on social media and provide a deeper understanding of the capabilities of new techniques based on machine learning. In particular, we compare the performance of Deep Learning methods with recently pre-trained language models based on Transfer Learning as well as with traditional machine learning models. Our main contribution is the achievement of promising results in Spanish by applying multilingual and monolingual pre-trained language models such as BERT, XLM and BETO. • Addressing hate speech detection on social media for Spanish. • Comparing the performance of Deep Learning and Machine Learning models. • Evaluating recent pre-trained language models based on Transformer mechanism. • Comparing pre-trained multilingual and monolingual models available for Spanish. • Conducting an error analysis in order to understand the difficulty of the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Developed browser plugins to visualize hate speech live on Facebook & Twitter. • Designed proof of concepts for personalized dashboards for Twitter & Instagram. • Optimized classifiers for Hate Speech with tests on standard datasets. • Application areas for the tool are discussed. The multi-fold growth of the social media user-base fuelled a substantial increase in the amount of hate speech posts on social media platforms. The enormous data volume makes it hard to capture such cases and either moderate or delete them. This paper presents an approach to detect and visualize online aggression, a special case of hate speech, over social media. Aggression is categorized into overtly aggressive (OAG), covertly aggressive (CAG), and non-aggressive labels (NAG). We have designed a user interface based on a web browser plugin over Facebook and Twitter to visualize the aggressive comments posted on the Social media user's timelines. This plugin interface might help to the security agency to keep a tab on the social media stream. It also provides citizens with a tool that is typically only available for large enterprises. The availability of such a tool alleviates the technological imbalance between industry and citizens. Besides, the system might be helpful to the research community to create further tools and prepare weakly labeled training data in a few minutes using comments posted by users on celebrity's Facebook, Twitter timeline. We have reported the results on a newly created dataset of user comments posted on Facebook and Twitter using our proposed plugins and the standard Trolling Aggression Cyberbullying 2018 (TRAC) dataset in English and code-mixed Hindi. Various classifiers like Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic regression, deep learning model based on Convolution Neural Network (CNN), Attention-based model, and the recently proposed BERT pre-trained language model by Google AI, have been used for aggression classification. The weighted F1-score of around 0.64 and 0.62 is achieved on TRAC Facebook English and Hindi datasets while on Twitter English and Hindi datasets, the weighted F1-score is 0.58 and 0.50, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A fuzzy rule-based approach is proposed for sentiment analysis of tweets. • Formulation of nine fuzzy rules to compute sentiment of each tweet. • The proposed unsupervised approach is suitable for any sentiment lexicon. • The approach can be adapted to both bipolar and tripolar sentiment analysis tasks. In this paper, we compute the sentiment of social media posts using a novel set of fuzzy rules involving multiple lexicons and datasets. The proposed fuzzy system integrates Natural Language Processing techniques and Word Sense Disambiguation using a novel unsupervised nine fuzzy rule based system to classify the post into: positive, negative or neutral sentiment class. We perform a comparative analysis of our method on nine public twitter datasets, three sentiment lexicons, four state-of-the-art approaches for unsupervised Sentiment Analysis and one state-of-the-art method for supervised machine learning. Traditionally, Sentiment Analysis of twitter data is performed using a single lexicon. Our results can give an insight to researchers to choose which lexicon is best for social media. The fusion of fuzzy logic with lexicons for sentiment classification provides a new paradigm in Sentiment Analysis. Our method can be adapted to any lexicon and any dataset (two-class or three-class sentiment). The experiments on benchmark datasets yield higher performance for our approach as compared to the state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]