How different cultures react and respond given a crisis is predominant in a society's norms and political will to combat the situation. Often, the decisions made are necessitated by events, social pressure, or the need of the hour, which may not represent the nation's will. While some are pleased with it, others might show resentment. Coronavirus (COVID-19) brought a mix of similar emotions from the nations towards the decisions taken by their respective governments. Social media was bombarded with posts containing both positive and negative sentiments on the COVID-19, pandemic, lockdown, and hashtags past couple of months. Despite geographically close, many neighboring countries reacted differently to one another. For instance, Denmark and Sweden, which share many similarities, stood poles apart on the decision taken by their respective governments. Yet, their nation's support was mostly unanimous, unlike the South Asian neighboring countries where people showed a lot of anxiety and resentment. The purpose of this study is to analyze reaction of citizens from different cultures to the novel Coronavirus and people's sentiment about subsequent actions taken by different countries. Deep long short-term memory (LSTM) models used for estimating the sentiment polarity and emotions from extracted tweets have been trained to achieve stateof-the-art accuracy on the sentiment140 dataset. The use of emoticons showed a unique and novel way of validating the supervised deep learning models on tweets extracted from Twitter.

Students' feedback is crucial for academic institutions in order to evaluate faculty performance. Handling the qualitative opinions of students efficiently while automatic report generation is a challenging task. Indeed, most organizations deal with quantitative feedback effectively, whereas qualitative feedback is either processed manually or ignored altogether. This study proposes a supervised aspect based opinion mining system based on two-layered LSTM model. The first layer predicts the aspects described within the feedback and later specifies the orientation (positive, negative, and neutral) of those predicted aspects. The model was tested on a manually tagged data set constructed from the last five years students' comments from Sukkur IBA University as well as on a standard SemEval-2014 data set. Unlike many other LSTM models proposed for other domains, the proposed model is quite simple in terms of architecture which results in less complexity. The system attains a good accuracy using the domain embedding layer in both tasks: aspect extraction (91%) and sentiment polarity detection (93%). To the best of our knowledge, this study is a first attempt that uses deep learning approach for performing aspect based sentiment analysis on students' feedback for evaluating faculty teaching performance.

No abstract

Data imbalance is a frequently occurring problem in classification tasks where the number of samples in one category exceeds the amount in others. Quite often, the minority class data is of great importance representing concepts of interest and is often challenging to obtain in real-life scenarios and applications. Imagine a customers’ dataset for bank loans-majority of the instances belong to non-defaulter class, only a small number of customers would be labeled as defaulters, however, the performance accuracy is more important on defaulters labels than non-defaulter in such highly imbalance datasets. Lack of enough data samples across all the class labels results in data imbalance causing poor classification performance while training the model. Synthetic data generation and oversampling techniques such as SMOTE, AdaSyn can address this issue for statistical data, yet such methods suffer from overfitting and substantial noise. While such techniques have proved useful for synthetic numerical and image data generation using GANs, the effectiveness of approaches proposed for textual data, which can retain grammatical structure, context, and semantic information, has yet to be evaluated. In this paper, we address this issue by assessing text sequence generation algorithms coupled with grammatical validation on domain-specific highly imbalanced datasets for text classification. We exploit recently proposed GPT-2 and LSTM-based text generation models to introduce balance in highly imbalanced text datasets. The experiments presented in this paper on three highly imbalanced datasets from different domains show that the performance of same deep neural network models improve up to 17% when datasets are balanced using generated text.

It has been more than a year since the coronavirus (COVID-19) engulfed the whole world, disturbing the daily routine, bringing down the economies, and killing two million people across the globe at the time of writing. The pandemic brought the world together to a joint effort to find a cure and work toward developing a vaccine. Much to the anticipation, the first batch of vaccines started rolling out by the end of 2020, and many countries began the vaccination drive early on while others still waiting in anticipation for a successful trial. Social media, meanwhile, was bombarded with all sorts of both positive and negative stories of the development and the evolving coronavirus situation. Many people were looking forward to the vaccines, while others were cautious about the side-effects and the conspiracy theories resulting in mixed emotions. This study explores users’ tweets concerning the COVID-19 vaccine and the sentiments expressed on Twitter. It tries to evaluate the polarity trend and a shift since the start of the coronavirus to the vaccination drive across six countries. The findings suggest that people of neighboring countries have shown quite a similar attitude regarding the vaccination in contrast to their different reactions to the coronavirus outbreak.

Urdu is still considered a low-resource language despite being ranked as the world's 10 th most spoken language with nearly 230 million speakers. The scarcity of benchmark datasets in lowresource languages has led researchers to utilize more ingenious techniques to curb the issue. One such option widely adopted is to use language translation services to replicate existing datasets from resourcerich languages such as English to low-resource languages, such as Urdu. For most natural language processing tasks, including polarity assessment, words translated via Google translator from one language to another often change the meaning. It results in a polarity shift causing the system's performance degradation, particularly for sentiment classification and emotion detection tasks. This study evaluates the effect of translation on the sentiment classification task from a resource-rich language to a low-resource language. It identifies and enlists words causing polarity shift into five distinct categories. It further finds the correlation between the language with similar roots. Our study shows 2-3 percentage points performance degradation due to polarity shift as a result of translation from resource-rich languages to low-resource languages.

No abstract

No abstract