Abstract
Deep learning approaches have become popular in many different areas, including sentiment analysis (SA), because of their competitive performance. However, the downside of this approach is that they do not provide understandable explanations on how the sentiment values are calculated. In contrast, previous approaches that used sentiment lexicons can do that, but their performance is normally not high. To leverage the strengths of both approaches, we present a neuro-symbolic approach that combines deep learning (DL) and symbolic methods for SA tasks. The DL approach uses a pre-trained language model (PLM) to construct sentiment lexicon. The symbolic approach exploits the constructed sentiment lexicon and manually constructed shifter patterns to determine the sentiment of a sentence. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach leads to promising results with the additional advantage that sentiment predictions can be accompanied by understandable explanations.

Abstract
Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from more than six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. These include 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research conducted on African languages. Crucial to enabling such research is the availability of high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce AfriSenti, a sentiment analysis benchmark that contains a total of >110,000 tweets in 14 African languages (Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yorùbá) from four language families. The tweets were annotated by native speakers and used in the AfriSenti-SemEval shared task 1. We describe the data collection methodology, annotation process, and the challenges we dealt with when curating each dataset. We further report baseline experiments conducted on the different datasets and discuss their usefulness. ©2023 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Abstract
Visualizing and examining the intellectual landscape and evolution of scientific communities to support collaboration is crucial for multiple research purposes. In some cases, measuring similarities and matching patterns between research publication document sets can help to identify people with similar interests for building research collaboration networks and university-industry linkages. The premise of this work is assessing feasibility for resolving ambiguous cases in similarity detection to determine authorship with natural language processing (NLP) techniques so that crowdsourcing is applied only in instances that require human judgment. Using an NLP-crowdsourcing convergence strategy, we can reduce the costs of microtask crowdsourcing while saving time and maintaining disambiguation accuracy over large datasets. This article contributes a next-gen crowd-artificial intelligence framework that used an ensemble of term frequency-inverse document frequency and bidirectional encoder representation from transformers to obtain similarity rankings for pairs of scientific documents. A sequence of content-based similarity tasks was created using a crowd-powered interface for solving disambiguation problems. Our experimental results suggest that an adaptive NLP-crowdsourcing hybrid framework has advantages for inter-researcher similarity detection tasks where fully automatic algorithms provide unsatisfactory results, with the goal of helping researchers discover potential collaborators using data-driven approaches.

Abstract
Many current AutoML platforms include a very large space of alternatives (the configuration space) that make it difficult to identify the best alternative for a given dataset. In this paper we explore a method that can reduce a large configuration space to a significantly smaller one and so help to reduce the search time for the potentially best workflow. We empirically validate the method on a set of workflows that include four ML algorithms (SVM, RF, LogR and LD) with different sets of hyperparameters. Our results show that it is possible to reduce the given space by more than one order of magnitude, from a few thousands to tens of workflows, while the risk that the best workflow is eliminated is nearly zero. The system after reduction is about one order of magnitude faster than the original one, but still maintains the same predictive accuracy and loss. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Deep learning approaches have become popular in sentiment analysis because of their competitive performance. The downside of this approach is that they do not provide understandable explanations on how the sentiment values are calculated. Previous approaches that used sentiment lexicons for sentiment analysis can do that, but their performance is lower than deep learning approaches. Therefore, it is natural to wonder if the two approaches can be combined to exploit their advantages. In this chapter, we present a neuro-symbolic approach that combines both symbolic and deep learning approaches for sentiment analysis tasks. The symbolic approach exploits sentiment lexicon and shifter patterns-which cover the operations of inversion/reversal, intensification, and attenuation/downtoning. The deep learning approach used a pre-trained language model (PLM) to construct sentiment lexicon. Our experimental result shows that the proposed approach leads to promising results, substantially better than the results of a pure lexicon-based approach. Although the results did not reach the level of the deep learning approach, a great advantage is that sentiment prediction can be accompanied by understandable explanations. For some users, it is very important to see how sentiment is derived, even if performance is a little lower. © 2023 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved.

Abstract