Computational Linguistics Commons^™

Ai Approaches To Understand Human Deceptions, Perceptions, And Perspectives In Social Media, Chih-Yuan Li

Dissertations

Social media platforms have created virtual space for sharing user generated information, connecting, and interacting among users. However, there are research and societal challenges: 1) The users are generating and sharing the disinformation 2) It is difficult to understand citizens' perceptions or opinions expressed on wide variety of topics; and 3) There are overloaded information and echo chamber problems without overall understanding of the different perspectives taken by different people or groups.

This dissertation addresses these three research challenges with advanced AI and Machine Learning approaches. To address the fake news, as deceptions on the facts, this dissertation presents Machine …

Predicting Stock Price Movements Using Sentiment And Subjectivity Analyses, Andrew Kirby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a quick search online, one can find many tools which use information from news headlines to make predictions concerning the trajectory of a given stock. But what if we went further, looking instead into the text of the article, to extract this and other information? Here, the goal is to extract the sentence in which a stock ticker symbol is mentioned from a news article, then determine sentiment and subjectivity values from that sentence, and finally make a prediction on whether or not the value of that stock will go up or not in a 24-hour timespan. Bloomberg News …

Plprepare: A Grammar Checker For Challenging Cases, Jacob Hoyos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates one of the Polish language’s most arbitrary cases: the genitive masculine inanimate singular. It collects and ranks several guidelines to help language learners discern its proper usage and also introduces a framework to provide detailed feedback regarding arbitrary cases. The study tests this framework by implementing and evaluating a hybrid grammar checker called PLPrepare. PLPrepare performs similarly to other grammar checkers and is able to detect genitive case usages and provide feedback based on a number of error classifications.

Quantifying Coherence In A Transdiagnostic Sample: A Methodological Investigation Of Computationally-Derived Coherence Using Ambulatory Assessment, Taylor L. Fedechko

LSU Master's Theses

Schizophrenia is a clinical diagnosis assigned to individuals that experience positive (e.g., hallucinations and delusions), negative (e.g., blunted affect), and disorganized (e.g., incoherent speech) symptoms. One particularly disabling symptom is incoherence, which is defined as the meaning-based relationship between ideas. This symptom can drastically affect an individual’s quality of life by affecting areas such as social and occupational functioning. Currently, the mechanism behind this symptom is unknown and requires further study. One way to examine incoherence is to understand its level of expression in other clinical populations. With the advent of computationally-derived natural language processing (NLP), coherence can be quantified …

Multimodal Depression Detection: An Investigation Of Features And Fusion Techniques For Automated Systems, Michelle Renee Morales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Depression is a serious illness that affects a large portion of the world’s population. Given the large effect it has on society, it is evident that depression is a serious health issue. This thesis evaluates, at length, how technology may aid in assessing depression. We present an in-depth investigation of features and fusion techniques for depression detection systems. We also present OpenMM: a novel tool for multimodal feature extraction. Lastly, we present novel techniques for multimodal fusion. The contributions of this work add considerably to our knowledge of depression detection systems and have the potential to improve future systems by …

Losing Shahrazad: A Distant Reading Of 1001 Nights, Taysa Mohler

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project is a distant reading analysis of seven 19th and 20th-century English translations of One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights. Through the use of computer programming and distant reading, it becomes clear that the Nights' frame tale is the carrier of the internal logic and generative power of the story cycle. Further, the frame tale expresses the Nights' self-representation, which serves to undermine the historical use of the Nights as synecdoche for the Orient. Therefore, the translators that remove the frame story from their versions further the Nights' use as an Orientalist object, …

An Examination Of Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution Techniques, Maxwell B. Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, Twitter has become a popular testing ground for techniques in authorship attribution. This is due to both the ease of building large corpora as well as the challenges associated with the character limit imposed by the service and the writing styles that have developed as a result. As both false and genuine claims of hacked Twitter accounts have made international news, there is an increasing need for this type of work. For newer Twitter accounts, however, there is little training data. Thus, this study looks to lay the groundwork for cross-domain authorship attribution: training on one source …

An Empirical Study Of Semantic Similarity In Wordnet And Word2vec, Abram Handler

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis performs an empirical analysis of Word2Vec by comparing its output to WordNet, a well-known, human-curated lexical database. It finds that Word2Vec tends to uncover more of certain types of semantic relations than others -- with Word2Vec returning more hypernyms, synonomyns and hyponyms than hyponyms or holonyms. It also shows the probability that neighbors separated by a given cosine distance in Word2Vec are semantically related in WordNet. This result both adds to our understanding of the still-unknown Word2Vec and helps to benchmark new semantic tools built from word vectors.

Identification Of Informativeness In Text Using Natural Language Stylometry, Rushdi Shams

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this age of information overload, one experiences a rapidly growing over-abundance of written text. To assist with handling this bounty, this plethora of texts is now widely used to develop and optimize statistical natural language processing (NLP) systems. Surprisingly, the use of more fragments of text to train these statistical NLP systems may not necessarily lead to improved performance. We hypothesize that those fragments that help the most with training are those that contain the desired information. Therefore, determining informativeness in text has become a central issue in our view of NLP. Recent developments in this field have spawned …

Predicting Music Genre Preferences Based On Online Comments, Andrew J. Sinclair

Master's Theses

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) states that individuals adapt to each other’s communicative behaviors. This adaptation is called “convergence.” In this work we explore the convergence of writing styles of users of the online music distribution plat- form SoundCloud.com. In order to evaluate our system we created a corpus of over 38,000 comments retrieved from SoundCloud in April 2014. The corpus represents comments from 8 distinct musical genres: Classical, Electronic, Hip Hop, Jazz, Country, Metal, Folk, and World. Our corpus contains: short comments, frequent misspellings, little sentence struc- ture, hashtags, emoticons, and URLs. We adapt techniques used by researchers analyzing other …

Csc Senior Project: Nlpstats, Michael Mease

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Natural Language Processing has recently increased in popularity. The field of authorship analysis, specifically, uses various characteristics of text quantified by markers. NLPStats serves as a tool designed to streamline marker extraction based on user needs. A flexible query system allows for custom marker requests, adjustment of result formatting, and preprocessing options. Furthermore, an efficiently designed structure ensures that users retrieve information quickly. As a whole, NLPStats enables anyone, regardless of NLP experience, to extract important information about the text of a document.