Mining and summarizing customer reviews
Merchants selling products on the Web often ask their customers to review the products that they have purchased and the associated services. As e-commerce is becoming more and more popular, the number of customer reviews that a product receives grows rapidly. For a popular product, the number of reviews can be in hundreds or even thousands. This makes it difficult for a potential customer to read them to make an informed decision on whether to purchase the product. It also makes it difficult for the manufacturer of the product to keep track and to manage customer opinions. For the manufacturer, there are additional difficulties because many merchant sites may sell the same product and the manufacturer normally produces many kinds of products. In this research, we aim to mine and to summarize all the customer reviews of a product. This summarization task is different from traditional text summarization because we only mine the features of the product on which the customers have expressed their opinions and whether the opinions are positive or negative. We do not summarize the reviews by selecting a subset or rewrite some of the original sentences from the reviews to capture the main points as in the classic text summarization. Our task is performed in three steps: (1) mining product features that have been commented on by customers; (2) identifying opinion sentences in each review and deciding whether each opinion sentence is positive or negative; (3) summarizing the results. This paper proposes several novel techniques to perform these tasks. Our experimental results using reviews of a number of products sold online demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques.

title: Dealing with different distributions in learning from
abstract: In the problem of learning with positive and unlabeled examples, existing research all assumes that positive examples P and the hidden positive examples in the unlabeled set U are generated from the same distribution. This assumption may be violated in practice. In such cases, existing methods perform poorly. This paper proposes a novel technique A-EM to deal with the problem. Experimental results with product page classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

title: Speed-up iterative frequent itemset mining with constraint changes
abstract: Mining of frequent itemsets is a fundamental data mining task. Past research has proposed many efficient algorithms for this purpose. Recent work also highlighted the importance of using constraints to focus the mining process to mine only those relevant itemsets. In practice, data mining is often an interactive and iterative process. The user typically changes constraints and runs the mining algorithm many times before being satisfied with the final results. This interactive process is very time consuming. Existing mining algorithms are unable to take advantage of this iterative process to use previous mining results to speed up the current mining process. This results in an enormous waste of time and computation. In this paper, we propose an efficient technique to utilize previous mining results to improve the efficiency of current mining when constraints are changed. We first introduce the concept of tree boundary to summarize useful information available from previous mining. We then show that the tree boundary provides an effective and efficient framework for the new mining. The proposed technique has been implemented in the context of two existing frequent itemset mining algorithms, FP-tree and tree projection. Experiment results on both synthetic and real-life datasets show that the proposed approach achieves a dramatic saving of computation.

title: Entity discovery and assignment for opinion mining applications
abstract: Opinion mining became an important topic of study in recent years due to its wide range of applications. There are also many companies offering opinion mining services. One problem that has not been studied so far is the assignment of entities that have been talked about in each sentence. Let us use forum discussions about products as an example to make the problem concrete. In a typical discussion post, the author may give opinions on multiple products and also compare them. The issue is how to detect what products have been talked about in each sentence. If the sentence contains the product names, they need to be identified. We call this problem entity discovery. If the product names are not explicitly mentioned in the sentence but are implied due to the use of pronouns and language conventions, we need to infer the products. We call this problem entity assignment. These problems are important because without knowing what products each sentence talks about the opinion mined from the sentence is of little use. In this paper, we study these problems and propose two effective methods to solve the problems. Entity discovery is based on pattern discovery and entity assignment is based on mining of comparative sentences. Experimental results using a large number of forum posts demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique. Our system has also been successfully tested in a commercial setting.

title: Finding Actionable Knowledge via Automated Comparison
abstract: The problem of finding interesting and actionable patterns is a major challenge in data mining. It has been studied by many data mining researchers. The issue is that data mining algorithms often generate too many patterns, which make it very hard for the user to find those truly useful ones. Over the years many techniques have been proposed. However, few have made it to real-life applications. At the end of 2005, we built a data mining system for Motorola (called Opportunity Map) to enable the user to explore the space of a large number of rules in order to find actionable knowledge. The approach is based on the concept of rule cubes and operations on rule cubes. A rule cube is similar to a data cube, but stores rules. Since its deployment, some issues have also been identified during the regular use of the system in Motorola. One of the key issues is that although the operations on rule cubes are flexible, each operation is primitive and has to be initiated by the user. Finding a piece of actionable knowledge typically involves many operations and intense visual inspections, which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. From interactions with our users, we identified a generic problem that is crucial for finding actionable knowledge. The problem involves extensive comparison of sub-populations and identification of the cause of their differences. This paper first defines the problem and then proposes an effective method to solve the problem automatically. To the best of our knowledge, there is no reported study of this problem. The new method has been added to the Opportunity Map system and is now in daily use in Motorola.

title: Opinion Mining
abstract: Описанл процедуру формування інтегрального показника об’єкта згідно з відгуками користувачів під час застосування методів оцінювання опінії текстової інформації у web-документах. Запропоновано використання лінгвістичних змінних та застосування вагових коефіцієнтів для достовірнішого результату оцінювання емоційного забарвлення текстової інформації. Ключові слова: опінія, емоційне забарвлення, об’єкт, інтегральний показник, лінгвістична змінна, ваговий коефіцієнт.

title: Dynamic Complexities in a Lotka-volterra Predator-prey Model Concerning impulsive Control Strategy
abstract: Based on the classical Lotka–Volterra predator–prey system, an impulsive differential equation to model the process of periodically releasing natural enemies and spraying pesticides at different fixed times for pest control is proposed and investigated. It is proved that there exists a globally asymptotically stable pest-eradication periodic solution when the impulsive period is less than some critical value. Otherwise, the system can be permanent. We observe that our impulsive control strategy is more effective than the classical one if we take chemical control efficiently. Numerical results show that the system we considered has more complex dynamics including period-doubling bifurcation, symmetry-breaking bifurcation, period-halving bifurcation, quasi-periodic oscillation, chaos and nonunique dynamics, meaning that several attractors coexist. Finally, a pest–predator stage-structured model for the pest concerning this kind of impulsive control strategy is proposed, and we also show that there exists a ...

title: Complex Analysis of Anisotropic Swarms
abstract: This paper considers a continuous time swarm model with individuals moving with a nutrient profile (or an attractant/repellent) in an n-dimensional space. The swarm behavior is a result of a balance between inter-individual interplays as well as the interplays of the swarm agents with their environment. It is proved that the swarm members aggregate and eventually form a cohesive cluster of finite size around the swarm weighted center in a finite time under certain conditions.

title: Fully automatic and segmentation-robust classification of breast tumors based on local texture analysis of ultrasound images
abstract: Region of interest (ROI) is a region used to extract features. In breast ultrasound (BUS) image, the ROI is a breast tumor region. Because of poor image quality (low SNR (signal/noise ratio), low contrast, blurry boundaries, etc.), it is difficult to segment the BUS image accurately and produce a ROI which precisely covers the tumor region. Due to the requirement of accurate ROI for feature extraction, fully automatic classification of BUS images becomes a difficult task. In this paper, a novel fully automatic classification method for BUS images is proposed which can be divided into two steps: ''ROI generation step'' and ''ROI classification step''. The ROI generation step focuses on finding a credible ROI instead of finding the precise tumor location. The ROI classification step employs a novel feature extraction and classification strategy. First, some points in the ROI are selected as the ''classification checkpoints'' which are evenly distributed in the ROI, and the local texture features around each classification checkpoint are extracted. For each ROI, all the classification checkpoints are classified. Finally, the class of the BUS image is determined by analyzing every classification checkpoint in the corresponding ROI. Both steps were implemented by utilizing a supervised texture classification approach. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is very robust to the segmentation of BUS images, and very effective and useful for classifying breast tumors.

title: Multi-Agent Based Network Management Task Decomposition and Scheduling
abstract: The rapid development of Internet makes network management on large-scale network a critical issue. But with the management task of large-scale network becoming more complicated, neither centralized network management nor agent based network management can satisfy the increasing demands. This paper presents a network management framework to support dynamic scheduling decisions. In this framework, some algorithms are proposed to decompose the whole network management task into several groups of sub-tasks. During the course of decomposition, different priorities are assigned to sub-tasks. Then based on the priorities of these sub-tasks, the strategies of agent scheduling are established. Priority-ranked sub-tasks are grouped according to their inter-dependences. Sub-tasks with the same priority are put into the same group and they can be performed in parallel manner, while different groups of sub-tasks with different priorities must be implemented according to the order of their priorities. An experiment has been done with the algorithms, the results of which demonstrate the advantage of the algorithms.

title: A combinational feature selection and ensemble neural network method for classification of gene expression data
abstract: BackgroundMicroarray experiments are becoming a powerful tool for clinical diagnosis, as they have the potential to discover gene expression patterns that are characteristic for a particular disease. To date, this problem has received most attention in the context of cancer research, especially in tumor classification. Various feature selection methods and classifier design strategies also have been generally used and compared. However, most published articles on tumor classification have applied a certain technique to a certain dataset, and recently several researchers compared these techniques based on several public datasets. But, it has been verified that differently selected features reflect different aspects of the dataset and some selected features can obtain better solutions on some certain problems. At the same time, faced with a large amount of microarray data with little knowledge, it is difficult to find the intrinsic characteristics using traditional methods. In this paper, we attempt to introduce a combinational feature selection method in conjunction with ensemble neural networks to generally improve the accuracy and robustness of sample classification.ResultsWe validate our new method on several recent publicly available datasets both with predictive accuracy of testing samples and through cross validation. Compared with the best performance of other current methods, remarkably improved results can be obtained using our new strategy on a wide range of different datasets.ConclusionsThus, we conclude that our methods can obtain more information in microarray data to get more accurate classification and also can help to extract the latent marker genes of the diseases for better diagnosis and treatment.