Applied Sciences

Research

25 pages, 2617 KiB

Open AccessArticle

An Improved Sentiment Classification Approach for Measuring User Satisfaction toward Governmental Services’ Mobile Apps Using Machine Learning Methods with Feature Engineering and SMOTE Technique

by Mohammed Hadwan, Mohammed Al-Sarem, Faisal Saeed and Mohammed A. Al-Hagery

Appl. Sci. 2022, 12(11), 5547; https://doi.org/10.3390/app12115547 - 30 May 2022

Cited by 15 | Viewed by 2429

Abstract

Analyzing the sentiment of Arabic texts is still a big research challenge due to the special characteristics and complexity of the Arabic language. Few studies have been conducted on Arabic sentiment analysis (ASA) compared to English or other Latin languages. In addition, most [...] Read more.

Analyzing the sentiment of Arabic texts is still a big research challenge due to the special characteristics and complexity of the Arabic language. Few studies have been conducted on Arabic sentiment analysis (ASA) compared to English or other Latin languages. In addition, most of the existing studies on ASA analyzed datasets collected from Twitter. However, little attention was given to the huge amounts of reviews for governmental or commercial mobile applications on Google Play or the App Store. For instance, the government of Saudi Arabia developed several mobile applications in healthcare, education, and other sectors as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To address this gap, this paper aims to analyze the users’ opinions of six applications in the healthcare sector. An improved sentiment classification approach was proposed for measuring user satisfaction toward governmental services’ mobile apps using machine learning models with different preprocessing methods. The Arb-AppsReview dataset was collected from the reviews of these six mobile applications available on Google Play and the App Store, which includes 51k reviews. Then, several feature engineering approaches were applied, which include Bing Liu lexicon, AFINN, and MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon, bag of words (BoW), term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), and the Google pre-trained Word2Vec. Additionally, the SMOTE technique was applied as a balancing technique on this dataset. Then, five ML models were applied to classify the sentiment opinions. The experimental results showed that the highest accuracy score (94.38%) was obtained by applying a support vector machine (SVM) using the SMOTE technique with all concatenated features. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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22 pages, 1743 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Framework to Understand Attitudes towards Immigration through Twitter

by Yerka Freire-Vidal, Eduardo Graells-Garrido and Francisco Rowe

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(20), 9689; https://doi.org/10.3390/app11209689 - 18 Oct 2021

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2746

Abstract

Understanding public opinion towards immigrants is key to prevent acts of violence, discrimination and abuse. Traditional data sources, such as surveys, provide rich insights into the formation of such attitudes; yet, they are costly and offer limited temporal granularity, providing only a partial [...] Read more.

Understanding public opinion towards immigrants is key to prevent acts of violence, discrimination and abuse. Traditional data sources, such as surveys, provide rich insights into the formation of such attitudes; yet, they are costly and offer limited temporal granularity, providing only a partial understanding of the dynamics of attitudes towards immigrants. Leveraging Twitter data and natural language processing, we propose a framework to measure attitudes towards immigration in online discussions. Grounded in theories of social psychology, the proposed framework enables the classification of users’ into profile stances of positive and negative attitudes towards immigrants and characterisation of these profiles quantitatively summarising users’ content and temporal stance trends. We use a Twitter sample composed of 36 K users and 160 K tweets discussing the topic in 2017, when the immigrant population in the country recorded an increase by a factor of four from 2010. We found that the negative attitude group of users is smaller than the positive group, and that both attitudes have different distributions of the volume of content. Both types of attitudes show fluctuations over time that seem to be influenced by news events related to immigration. Accounts with negative attitudes use arguments of labour competition and stricter regulation of immigration. In contrast, accounts with positive attitudes reflect arguments in support of immigrants’ human and civil rights. The framework and its application can inform policy makers about how people feel about immigration, with possible implications for policy communication and the design of interventions to improve negative attitudes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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21 pages, 1572 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Enhancement of Text Analysis Using Context-Aware Normalization of Social Media Informal Text

by Jebran Khan and Sungchang Lee

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(17), 8172; https://doi.org/10.3390/app11178172 - 03 Sep 2021

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2860

Abstract

We proposed an application and data variations-independent, generic social media Textual Variations Handler (TVH) to deal with a wide range of noise in textual data generated in various social media (SM) applications for enhanced text analysis. The aim is to build an effective [...] Read more.

We proposed an application and data variations-independent, generic social media Textual Variations Handler (TVH) to deal with a wide range of noise in textual data generated in various social media (SM) applications for enhanced text analysis. The aim is to build an effective hybrid normalization technique that ensures the use of useful information of the noisy text in its intended form instead of filtering them out to analyze SM text better. The proposed TVH performs context-aware text normalization based on intended meaning to avoid the wrong word substitution. We integrate the TVH with state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep-learning-based text analysis methods to enhance their performance for noisy SM text data. The proposed scheme shows promising improvement in the text analysis of informal SM text in terms of precision, recall, accuracy, and F1-score in simulation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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19 pages, 1434 KiB

Open AccessArticle

AraSenCorpus: A Semi-Supervised Approach for Sentiment Annotation of a Large Arabic Text Corpus

by Ali Al-Laith, Muhammad Shahbaz, Hind F. Alaskar and Asim Rehmat

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(5), 2434; https://doi.org/10.3390/app11052434 - 09 Mar 2021

Cited by 28 | Viewed by 3676

Abstract

At a time when research in the field of sentiment analysis tends to study advanced topics in languages, such as English, other languages such as Arabic still suffer from basic problems and challenges, most notably the availability of large corpora. Furthermore, manual annotation [...] Read more.

At a time when research in the field of sentiment analysis tends to study advanced topics in languages, such as English, other languages such as Arabic still suffer from basic problems and challenges, most notably the availability of large corpora. Furthermore, manual annotation is time-consuming and difficult when the corpus is too large. This paper presents a semi-supervised self-learning technique, to extend an Arabic sentiment annotated corpus with unlabeled data, named AraSenCorpus. We use a neural network to train a set of models on a manually labeled dataset containing 15,000 tweets. We used these models to extend the corpus to a large Arabic sentiment corpus called “AraSenCorpus”. AraSenCorpus contains 4.5 million tweets and covers both modern standard Arabic and some of the Arabic dialects. The long-short term memory (LSTM) deep learning classifier is used to train and test the final corpus. We evaluate our proposed framework on two external benchmark datasets to ensure the improvement of the Arabic sentiment classification. The experimental results show that our corpus outperforms the existing state-of-the-art systems. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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14 pages, 2826 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Valence and Arousal-Infused Bi-Directional LSTM for Sentiment Analysis of Government Social Media Management

by Yu-Ya Cheng, Yan-Ming Chen, Wen-Chao Yeh and Yung-Chun Chang

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(2), 880; https://doi.org/10.3390/app11020880 - 19 Jan 2021

Cited by 10 | Viewed by 3624

Abstract

Private entrepreneurs and government organizations widely adopt Facebook fan pages as an online social platform to communicate with the public. Posting on the platform to attract people’s comments and shares is an effective way to increase public engagement. Moreover, the comment functions allow [...] Read more.

Private entrepreneurs and government organizations widely adopt Facebook fan pages as an online social platform to communicate with the public. Posting on the platform to attract people’s comments and shares is an effective way to increase public engagement. Moreover, the comment functions allow users who have read the posts to express their thoughts. Hence, it also enables us to understand the users’ emotional feelings regarding that post by analyzing the comments. The goal of this study is to investigate the public image of organizations by exploring the content on fan pages. In order to efficiently analyze the enormous amount of public opinion data generated from social media, we propose a Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) that can model detailed sentiment information hidden in those words. It first forecasts the sentiment information in terms of Valence and Arousal (VA) values of the smallest unit in a text, and later fuses this into a deep learning model to further analyze the sentiment of the whole text. Experiments show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of predicting the VA values of words. Additionally, combining VA with a BiLSTM model results in a boost of the performance for social media text sentiment analysis. Our method can assist governments or other organizations to improve their effectiveness in social media operations through the understanding of public opinions on related issues. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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26 pages, 903 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Introducing Sentiment Analysis of Textual Reviews in a Multi-Criteria Decision Aid System

by Mohammed Jabreel, Najlaa Maaroof, Aida Valls and Antonio Moreno

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(1), 216; https://doi.org/10.3390/app11010216 - 28 Dec 2020

Cited by 12 | Viewed by 3161

Abstract

Nowadays, most decision processes rely not only on the preferences of the decision maker but also on the public opinions about the possible alternatives. The user preferences have been heavily taken into account in the multi-criteria decision making field. On the other hand, [...] Read more.

Nowadays, most decision processes rely not only on the preferences of the decision maker but also on the public opinions about the possible alternatives. The user preferences have been heavily taken into account in the multi-criteria decision making field. On the other hand, sentiment analysis is the field of natural language processing devoted to the development of systems that are capable of analysing reviews to obtain their polarity. However, there have not been many works up to now that integrate the results of this process with the analysis of the alternatives in a decision support system. SentiRank is a novel system that takes into account both the preferences of the decision maker and the public online reviews about the alternatives to be ranked. A new mechanism to integrate both aspects into the ranking process is proposed in this paper. The sentiments of the reviews with respect to different aspects are added to the decision support system as a set of additional criteria, and the ELECTRE methodology is used to rank the alternatives. The system has been implemented and tested with a restaurant data set. The experimental results confirm the appeal of adding the sentiment information from the reviews to the ranking process. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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15 pages, 10434 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Personality Trait Analysis in Social Networks Based on Weakly Supervised Learning of Shared Images

by Pau Rodríguez, Diego Velazquez, Guillem Cucurull, Josep M. Gonfaus, F. Xavier Roca, Seiichi Ozawa and Jordi Gonzàlez

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(22), 8170; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10228170 - 18 Nov 2020

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3109

Abstract

Social networks have attracted the attention of psychologists, as the behavior of users can be used to assess personality traits, and to detect sentiments and critical mental situations such as depression or suicidal tendencies. Recently, the increasing amount of image uploads to social [...] Read more.

Social networks have attracted the attention of psychologists, as the behavior of users can be used to assess personality traits, and to detect sentiments and critical mental situations such as depression or suicidal tendencies. Recently, the increasing amount of image uploads to social networks has shifted the focus from text to image-based personality assessment. However, obtaining the ground-truth requires giving personality questionnaires to the users, making the process very costly and slow, and hindering research on large populations. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to predict which images are most associated with each personality trait of the OCEAN personality model, without requiring ground-truth personality labels. Namely, we present a weakly supervised framework which shows that the personality scores obtained using specific images textually associated with particular personality traits are highly correlated with scores obtained using standard text-based personality questionnaires. We trained an OCEAN trait model based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), learned from 120K pictures posted with specific textual hashtags, to infer whether the personality scores from the images uploaded by users are consistent with those scores obtained from text. In order to validate our claims, we performed a personality test on a heterogeneous group of 280 human subjects, showing that our model successfully predicts which kind of image will match a person with a given level of a trait. Looking at the results, we obtained evidence that personality is not only correlated with text, but with image content too. Interestingly, different visual patterns emerged from those images most liked by persons with a particular personality trait: for instance, pictures most associated with high conscientiousness usually contained healthy food, while low conscientiousness pictures contained injuries, guns, and alcohol. These findings could pave the way to complement text-based personality questionnaires with image-based questions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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17 pages, 1548 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Combining Post Sentiments and User Participation for Extracting Public Stances from Twitter

by Jenq-Haur Wang, Ting-Wei Liu and Xiong Luo

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(22), 8035; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10228035 - 12 Nov 2020

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 1762

Abstract

With the wide popularity of social media, it’s becoming more convenient for people to express their opinions online. To better understand what the public think about a topic, sentiment classification techniques have been widely used to estimate the overall orientation of opinions in [...] Read more.

With the wide popularity of social media, it’s becoming more convenient for people to express their opinions online. To better understand what the public think about a topic, sentiment classification techniques have been widely used to estimate the overall orientation of opinions in post contents. However, users might have various degrees of influence depending on their participation in discussions on different topics. In this paper, we address the issues of combining sentiment classification and link analysis techniques for extracting stances of the public from social media. Since social media posts are usually very short, word embedding models are first used to learn different word usages in various contexts. Then, deep learning methods such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) are used to learn the long-distance context dependency among words for better estimation of sentiments. Third, we consider the major user participation in popular social media by adjusting the users weights to reflect their relative influence in user-post interaction graphs. Finally, we combine post sentiments and user influences into a total opinion score for extracting public stances. In the experiments, we evaluated the performance of our proposed approach for tweets about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The best performance of sentiment classification can be observed with an F-measure of 72.97% for LSTM classifiers. This shows the effectiveness of deep learning methods in learning word usage in social media contexts. The experimental results on stance extraction showed the best performance of 0.68% Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in aggregating public stances on election candidates. This shows the potential of combining tweet sentiments and user participation structures for extracting the aggregate stances of the public on popular topics. Further investigation is needed to verify the performance in different social media sources. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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19 pages, 544 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Time of Your Hate: The Challenge of Time in Hate Speech Detection on Social Media

by Komal Florio, Valerio Basile, Marco Polignano, Pierpaolo Basile and Viviana Patti

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(12), 4180; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10124180 - 18 Jun 2020

Cited by 58 | Viewed by 7304

Abstract

The availability of large annotated corpora from social media and the development of powerful classification approaches have contributed in an unprecedented way to tackle the challenge of monitoring users’ opinions and sentiments in online social platforms across time. Such linguistic data are strongly [...] Read more.

The availability of large annotated corpora from social media and the development of powerful classification approaches have contributed in an unprecedented way to tackle the challenge of monitoring users’ opinions and sentiments in online social platforms across time. Such linguistic data are strongly affected by events and topic discourse, and this aspect is crucial when detecting phenomena such as hate speech, especially from a diachronic perspective. We address this challenge by focusing on a real case study: the “Contro l’odio” platform for monitoring hate speech against immigrants in the Italian Twittersphere. We explored the temporal robustness of a BERT model for Italian (AlBERTo), the current benchmark on non-diachronic detection settings. We tested different training strategies to evaluate how the classification performance is affected by adding more data temporally distant from the test set and hence potentially different in terms of topic and language use. Our analysis points out the limits that a supervised classification model encounters on data that are heavily influenced by events. Our results show how AlBERTo is highly sensitive to the temporal distance of the fine-tuning set. However, with an adequate time window, the performance increases, while requiring less annotated data than a traditional classifier. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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20 pages, 2190 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Using Keystroke Dynamics in a Multi-Agent System for User Guiding in Online Social Networks

by Guillem Aguado, Vicente Julián, Ana García-Fornes and Agustín Espinosa

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(11), 3754; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10113754 - 28 May 2020

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2332

Abstract

Nowadays there is a strong integration of online social platforms and applications with our daily life. Such interactions can make risks arise and compromise the information we share, thereby leading to privacy issues. In this work, a proposal that makes use of a [...] Read more.

Nowadays there is a strong integration of online social platforms and applications with our daily life. Such interactions can make risks arise and compromise the information we share, thereby leading to privacy issues. In this work, a proposal that makes use of a software agent that performs sentiment analysis and another performing stress analysis on keystroke dynamics data has been designed and implemented. The proposal consists of a set of new agents that have been integrated into a multi-agent system (MAS) for guiding users interacting in online social environments, which has agents for sentiment and stress analysis on text. We propose a combined analysis using the different agents. The MAS analyzes the states of the users when they are interacting, and warns them if the messages they write are deemed negative. In this way, we aim to prevent potential negative outcomes on social network sites (SNSs). We performed experiments in the laboratory with our private SNS Pesedia over a period of one month, so we gathered data about text messages and keystroke dynamics data, and used the datasets to train the artificial neural networks (ANNs) of the agents. A set of experiments was performed for discovering which analysis is able to detect a state of the user that propagates more in the SNS, so it may be more informative for the MAS. Our study will help develop future intelligent systems that utilize user data in online social environments for guiding or helping them in their social experience. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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22 pages, 548 KiB

Open AccessArticle

CRANK: A Hybrid Model for User and Content Sentiment Classification Using Social Context and Community Detection

by J. Fernando Sánchez-Rada and Carlos A. Iglesias

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(5), 1662; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10051662 - 01 Mar 2020

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2536

Abstract

Recent works have shown that sentiment analysis on social media can be improved by fusing text with social context information. Social context is information such as relationships between users and interactions of users with content. Although existing works have already exploited the networked [...] Read more.

Recent works have shown that sentiment analysis on social media can be improved by fusing text with social context information. Social context is information such as relationships between users and interactions of users with content. Although existing works have already exploited the networked structure of social context by using graphical models or techniques such as label propagation, more advanced techniques from social network analysis remain unexplored. Our hypothesis is that these techniques can help reveal underlying features that could help with the analysis. In this work, we present a sentiment classification model (CRANK) that leverages community partitions to improve both user and content classification. We evaluated this model on existing datasets and compared it to other approaches. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sentiment Analysis for Social Media Ⅱ)

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