The utility of linguistic rules in opinion mining
Online product reviews are one of the important opinion sources on the Web. This paper studies the problem of determining the semantic orientations (positive or negative) of opinions expressed on product features in reviews. Most existing approaches use a set of opinion words for the purpose. However, the semantic orientations of many words are context dependent. In this paper, we propose to use some linguistic rules to deal with the problem together with a new opinion aggregation function. Extensive experiments show that these rules and the function are highly effective. A system, called Opinion Observer, has also been built.

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Systematic benchmarking of microarray data feature extraction and classification
abstract: A combination of microarrays with classification methods is a promising approach to supporting clinical management decisions in oncology. The aim of this paper is to systematically benchmark the role of classification models. Each classification model is a combination of one feature extraction method and one classification method. We consider four feature extraction methods and five classification methods, from which 20 classification models can be derived. The feature extraction methods are t-statistics, non-parametric Wilcoxon statistics, ad hoc signal-to-noise statistics, and principal component analysis (PCA), and the classification methods are Fisher linear discriminant analysis (FLDA), the support vector machine (SVM), the k nearest-neighbour classifier (kNN), diagonal linear discriminant analysis (DLDA), and diagonal quadratic discriminant analysis (DQDA). Twenty randomizations of each of three binary cancer classification problems derived from publicly available datasets are examined. PCA plus FLDA is found to be the optimal classification model.

title: A Neural Network Approach To Shape From Shading
abstract: In this paper, we propose a method of recovering shape from shading that solves directly for the surface height using neural networks. The main motivation of this paper is to provide an answer to the open problem proposed by Zhou and Chellappa [11]. We first formulate the shape from shading problem by combining a triangular element surface model with a linearized reflectance map. Then, we use a linear feed-forward network architecture with six layers to compute the surface height with a singular value decomposition. The weights in the model initialized using eigenvectors and eigen-values of the stiffness matrix of objective functional. Experimental results show that our solution is very effective.

title: Numerical Experiments with Monte Carlo Methods and SPAI Preconditioner for Solving System of Linear Equations
abstract: In this paper we present the results of experiments comparing the performance of the mixed Monte Carlo algorithms and SPAI preconditener with BICGSTAB. The experiments are carried out on a Silicon Graphics ONYX2 machine. Based on our experiments, we conclude that these techniques are comparable from the point of view of robustness and rates of convergence, with the Monte Carlo approach performing better for some general cases and SPAI approach performing better in case of very sparse matrices.

title: Accelerated Bundle Adjustment in Multiple-View Reconstruction
abstract: Bundle adjustment is one of the main tools used for multi- ple view reconstruction. It seeks to refine the estimate of the 3D scene and the view parameter that minimize a certain cost function, e.g. the overall reprojection error. In this paper we propose a new algorithm to simplify the computation of the reprojection error for multiple views. With this algorithm, the bundle adjustment will be accelerated, whether the cameras are calibrated or un-calibrated. The proposed techniques for bundle adjustment are not only tolerant of missing data, but also allow the assignment of individual covariance to each image measure- ment. Experiments are conducted both on synthetic data and on real data to compare the proposed bundle adjustment techniques with the other existing methods. It is shown that the result obtained with the proposed techniques is comparable to that with the maximum likelihood estimation, however, it is more efficient.

title: Variable Weights Decision-Making and Its Fuzzy Inference Implementation
abstract: This paper investigates multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) problems with preference information on alternatives. Principle of variable weights evaluation is introduced first. Then, a new algorithm, fuzzy inference variable weights method, is proposed. The principle of fuzzy logic control (FLC) and available techniques of variable weights evaluation are merged together, to formulate the new method to determine the adjusted weights of attributes for MADM problems with preferences. An example is provided to illustrate the utility and effectiveness of the proposed method.