Abstract

Hashtags are semantico-syntactic constructs used across various social networking and microblogging platforms to enable users to start a topic specific discussion or classify a post into a desired category. Segmenting and linking the entities present within the hashtags could therefore help in better understanding and extraction of information shared across the social media. However, due to lack of space delimiters in the hashtags (e.g #nsavssnowden), the segmentation of hashtags into constituent entities (“NSA” and “Edward Snowden” in this case) is not a trivial task. Most of the current state-of-the-art social media analytics systems like Sentiment Analysis and Entity Linking tend to either ignore hashtags, or treat them as a single word. In this paper, we present a context aware approach to segment and link entities in the hashtags to a knowledge base (KB) entry, based on the context within the tweet. Our approach segments and links the entities in hashtags such that the coherence between hashtag semantics and the tweet is maximized. To the best of our knowledge, no existing study addresses the issue of linking entities in hashtags for extracting semantic information. We evaluate our method on two different datasets, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique in improving the overall entity linking in tweets via additional semantic information provided by segmenting and linking entities in a hashtag.

Abstract

Crowdsourcing marketplaces link large populations of workers to an even larger number of tasks. Thus, it is necessary to have mechanisms for matching workers with interesting and suitable tasks. Earlier work has addressed the problem of finding optimal workers for a given set of tasks. However, workers also have preferences and will stay with a platform only if it gives them interesting tasks. We therefore analyze several matching mechanisms that take into account workers’ preferences as well. We propose that the workers pay premiums to get preferred matches and auction-based models where preferences are expressed through variations of the payment for a task. We analyze the properties of two matching different mechanisms: Split Dynamic VCG (SDV) and e-Auction. We compare both the mechanisms with Arrival Priority Serial Dictatorship (APSD) empirically for efficiency.

Abstract

Extractive summarization is the process of precisely choosing a set of sentences from a corpus which can actually be a representative of the original corpus in a limited space. In addition to exhibiting a good content coverage, the final summary should be readable as well as structurally and topically coherent. In this paper we present a holistic, multi-document summarization approach which takes care of the content coverage, sentence ordering, maintenance of topical coherence, topical order and inter-sentence structural relationships. To achieve this we have introduced a novel concept of a Local Coherent Unit (LCU). Our results are comparable with the peer systems for content coverage and sentence ordering measured in terms of ROUGE and τ score respectively. The human evaluation preference for readability and coherence of summary are significantly better for our approach vis a vis other approaches. The approach is scalable to bigger realtime corpus as well.

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for Robust Infrastructure over Shared Computing resource (RISC), which can offer Organizations with Small-scale Computing infrastructures (OSCs) a way to share their unused resources in an ad-hoc manner for suitable monetary incentives. Such a framework provides dual benefits to an OSC: it enables sharing of unused resource during periods of low computing load while allowing execution of any long-term computation on public or anonymized data at a very low cost during periods of high load. The ad-hoc and heterogeneous nature of the shared infrastructure make the resource management problem in RISC non-trivial—a resource manager needs to: (i) maximize profit while determining incentives for resource owners and prices for resource users in an integrated manner; and (ii) emulate large-scale cloud-like robustness and capabilities out of unreliable, small-scale and intermittently available resources at a low cost. This leads to a constrained market situation where offered prices and incentives should lead to a desired level of SLA and reliability for the consumers. Existing approaches of incentive based scheduling for market-like grids assume an open market, based only on demand response; and thus are inapplicable for the constrained market situation in shared resources infrastructure. Specifically, RISC framework has two main components: (i) a firstof-a-kind Dynamic Pricing and Incentivization (DPI) strategy that computes the incentives and the prices while maximizing profit for RISC, using an epoch-by-epoch pricing feedback loop; and (ii) a DPI dependent Reliability, Cost and SLAaware (RCS) scheduler that takes the resource reservation requests as input and assigns replicas of these requests to one or more shared resources for guaranteeing performance SLAs and reliability, while minimizing the cost of resource reservations. Moreover, to handle the communication overhead of computing over geographically distributed resources, the scheduler strives to reduce the network cost of resource allocation. Results from extensive trace-driven experimentation show that our approach can indeed provide appropriate incentives for resource providers, and robust cost-efficient infrastructure solution for resource users.

Abstract

Following the footsteps of SemEval-2014 Task 4 (Pontiki et al., 2014), SemEval-2015 too had a task dedicated to aspect-level sentiment analysis (Pontiki et al., 2015), which saw participation from over 25 teams. In Aspectbased Sentiment Analysis, the aim is to identify the aspects of entities and the sentiment expressed for each aspect. In this paper, we present a detailed description of our system, that stood 4th in Aspect Category subtask (slot 1), 7th in Opinion Target Expression subtask (slot 2) and 8th in Sentiment Polarity subtask (slot 3) on the Restaurant datasets.

Abstract

On various microblogging platforms like Twitter, the users post short text messages ranging from news and information to thoughts and daily chatter. These messages often contain keywords called Hashtags, which are semantico-syntactic constructs that enable topical classification of the microblog posts. In this poster, we propose and evaluate a novel method of semantic enrichment of microblogs for a particular type of entity search--retrieving a ranked list of the top-k hashtags relevant to a user's query Q. Such a list can help the users track posts of their general interest. We show that our technique significantly improved microblog retrieval as well. We tested our approach on the publicly available Stanford sentiment analysis tweet corpus. We observed an improvement of more than 10% in NDCG for microblog retrieval task, and around 11% in mean average precision for hashtag retrieval task.

Abstract

This paper describes the system that was submitted to SemEval2015 Task 10: Sentiment Analysis in Twitter. We participated in Subtask B: Message Polarity Classification. The task is a message level classification of tweets into positive, negative and neutral sentiments. Our model is primarily a supervised one which consists of well designed features fed into an SVM classifier. In previous runs of this task, it was found that lexicons played an important role in determining the sentiment of a tweet. We use existing lexicons to extract lexicon specific features. The lexicon based features are further augmented by tweet specific features. We also improve our system by using acronym and emoticon dictionaries. The proposed system achieves an F1 score of 59.83 and 67.04 on the Test Data and Progress Data respectively. This placed us at the 18th position for the Test Dataset and the 16th position for the Progress Test Dataset.

Abstract

Following the footsteps of SemEval-2014 Task 4 (Pontiki et al., 2014), SemEval-2015 too had a task dedicated to aspect-level sentiment analysis (Pontiki et al., 2015), which saw participation from over 25 teams. In Aspectbased Sentiment Analysis, the aim is to identify the aspects of entities and the sentiment expressed for each aspect. In this paper, we present a detailed description of our system, that stood 4th in Aspect Category subtask (slot 1), 7th in Opinion Target Expression subtask (slot 2) and 8th in Sentiment Polarity subtask (slot 3) on the Restaurant datasets.

Abstract

Like SemEval 2013 and 2014, the task Sentiment Analysis in Twitter found a place in this year’s SemEval too and attracted an unprecedented number of participations. This task comprises of four sub-tasks. We participated in subtask 2—Message polarity classification. Although we lie a few notches down from the top system, we present a very simple yet effective approach to handle this problem that can be implemented in a single day!

Abstract

Universities across the world are increasingly trying to become more entrepreneurial, in order to stay competitive, generate new sources of income through licensing or contract research, and follow policy guidelines from governments. The most powerful resource universities have to stimulate entrepreneurship is their students. However, there is no evaluated theory on how to encourage students to become entrepreneurs. Through three case studies the entrepreneurial encouragement offerings applied at MIT in the United States, IIIT in India, and Utrecht University in the Netherlands are investigated. The offerings provided by these institutes have been surveyed, interviews about these offerings with university staff have been performed, and reflected upon through interviews with entrepreneurs that graduated from these institutes. The three case studies provide insight in how student entrepreneurship encouragement offerings contributed to students choosing a career as an entrepreneur. Several successful examples of student entrepreneurship encouragement offerings are presented, and a model is proposed on how to effectively encourage entrepreneurship among students. The model supports academic institutes in constructing an environment that encourages student entrepreneurship and aims to help universities convince students to continue their careers as entrepreneurs.