Visualizing the Invisible: Recognizing and Visualizing Emotions in Event-Related Tweets

[Seminar cancelled]

Speaker:        Dr. Pearl Pu
                Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)

Title:          "Visualizing the Invisible: Recognizing and Visualizing
                 Emotions in Event-Related Tweets"

Date:           Monday, 6 October 2014

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Spectators are increasingly using social platforms to comment about big
public events such as sports games and political debates. The quantity of
such data is too overwhelming to be processed by a human. During the 2012
Olympic games, 150 million tweets were generated on Twitter alone.

To understand the public's perception of these events, it is important to
recognize the subjective content revealed in such "big data". This has
motivated us to develop a system to automatically detect and visualize the
patterns and trends of user sentiments as expressed in their comments, and
how their sentiments evolve over time. Previous work in opinion mining has
addressed some of these issues. But the majority of them identify only two
categories of emotions: positive and negative, leaving a more detailed and
insightful analysis to be desired.

In this talk, I describe Emotion Watch, a data mining and visualization
tool, that helps people make sense of spectators' emotional reactions in
public events using a fine-grained, multi-category emotion model.

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Biography:

Pearl Pu currently leads the HCI Group in the School of Computer and
Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Lausanne (EPFL). Her research interests include recommendation technology,
electronic commerce, user adoption of technology, online consumer decision
behavior, and social media.

She grew up in Shanghai, China, and holds a Ph.D. in Computer and
Information Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania in the United
States. She is most credited for inventing the critiquing-based
recommender system. She was also first to show recommender technology's
ability to improve users' decision accuracy. She was elected two times to
serve as a chairperson for the ACM International Conference on Recommender
systems, in 2008 and 2013 respectively. She was recently invited to be
part of the ACM Distinguished Speaker Program in HCI.