Sensing well-being using heterogeneous smartphone data and stance identification in social media conversations

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Maria Liakata (Warwick University)
• Thursday 24 November 2016, 11:00-12:00
• GR05, English Faculty, 9 West Road (Sidgwick Site).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Mohammad Taher Pilehvar.

In the first part of my talk I will describe a new problem of predicting affect and well-being scales in a real-world setting of heterogeneous, longitudinal and non-synchronous textual as well as non-linguistic data that can be harvested from on-line media and mobile phones. We describe the method for collecting the heterogeneous longitudinal data, how features are extracted to address missing information and differences in temporal alignment, and how the latter are combined using multi-kernel learning to yield promising predictions of affect and well-being.

In the second part of my talk I will discuss rumour stance classification as a sequential task. Rumour stance classification, the task that determines if each tweet in a collection discussing a rumour is supporting, denying, questioning or simply commenting on the rumour, has been attracting substantial interest. We introduce a novel approach that makes use of the sequence of transitions observed in tree-structured conversation threads in Twitter. The conversation threads are formed by harvesting users’ replies to one another, which results in a nested tree-like structure. Previous work addressing the stance classification task has treated each tweet as a separate unit. Here we analyse tweets by virtue of their position in a sequence and test two sequential classifiers, Linear-Chain CRF and Tree CRF , each of which makes different assumptions about the conversational structure. We experiment with eight Twitter datasets, collected during breaking news, and show that exploiting the sequential structure of Twitter conversations achieves significant improvements over the non-sequential methods.

This talk is part of the Language Technology Lab Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)
• Cambridge Forum of Science and Humanities
• Cambridge Language Sciences
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• GR05, English Faculty, 9 West Road (Sidgwick Site)
• Guy Emerson's list
• Interested Talks
• Language Sciences for Graduate Students
• Language Technology Lab Seminars
• Simon Baker's List
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• ndk22's list
• ob366-ai4er
• rp587

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.