Implicit sentiment analysis (ISA) presents significant challenges due to the absence of salient cue words. Previous methods have struggled with insufficient data and limited reasoning capabilities to infer underlying opinions. Integrating multi-task learning (MTL) with large language models (LLMs) offers the potential to enable models of varying sizes to reliably perceive and recognize genuine opinions in ISA. However, existing MTL approaches are constrained by two sources of uncertainty:data-level uncertainty, arising from hallucination problems in LLM-generated contextual information, andtask-level uncertainty, stemming from the varying capacities of models to process contextual information. To handle these uncertainties, we proposeMT-ISA, a novel MTL framework that enhances ISA by leveraging the generation and reasoning capabilities of LLMs through automatic weight learning (AWL). Specifically,MT-ISAconstructs auxiliary tasks using generative LLMs to supplement sentiment elements and incorporates automatic MTL to fully exploit auxiliary data. We introduce data-level and task-level AWL, which dynamically identify relationships and prioritize more reliable data and critical tasks, enabling models of varying sizes to adaptively learn fine-grained weights based on their reasoning capabilities. Three strategies are investigated for data-level AWL, which are integrated with homoscedastic uncertainty for task-level AWL. Extensive experiments reveal that models of varying sizes achieve an optimal balance between primary prediction and auxiliary tasks inMT-ISA. This underscores the effectiveness and adaptability of our approach.

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) requires reasoning about the visual grounding relations between the images and questions by incorporating external knowledge. Existing works typically retrieve knowledge from knowledge graphs by leveraging global multimodal representations of image–text pairs for graph convolution, which neglect contextual clues at hop granularity, resulting in suboptimal spreading and leveraging of contextual information. To this end, we propose a multi-hop graph reasoning network (MGRN) for KB-VQA, which consists of a knowledge graph constructor (KGC) module, a semantic-instructed graph reasoning (SGR) module, and an answering module. MGRN exploits multimodal semantics from given images and questions as instructions for graph reasoning to obtain the knowledge representation from either the scene graph or knowledge base. Specifically, KGC fuses the scene graph with triplets from ConceptNet and Comet to construct a contextual knowledge graph for retrieving knowledge representation. Furthermore, SGR conducts multi-hop graph reasoning to select top- K knowledge items for answering by passing and filtering interplay messages on contextual knowledge graphs under the guidance of multimodal semantic representation. Extensive experiments conducted on two public datasets show the effectiveness and outperformance of our method.

Personalized clinical decision support systems are increasingly being adopted due to the emergence of data-driven technologies, with this approach now gaining recognition in critical care. The task of incorporating diverse patient conditions and treatment procedures into critical care decision-making can be challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of medical data. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques, enables the development of personalized treatment strategies for severe illnesses by using a learning agent to recommend optimal policies. In this study, we propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) model with a tailored reward function and an LSTM-GRU-derived state representation to formulate optimal treatment policies for vasopressor administration in stabilizing patient physiological states in critical care settings. Using an ICU dataset and the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III) dataset, we focus on patients with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) that has led to Sepsis, to derive optimal policies that can prioritize patient recovery over patient survival. Both the DDQN ( RepDRL-DDQN ) and Dueling DDQN ( RepDRL-DDDQN ) versions of the DRL model surpass the baseline performance, with the proposed model’s learning agent achieving an optimal learning process across our performance measuring schemes. The robust state representation served as the foundation for enhancing the model’s performance, ultimately providing an optimal treatment policy focused on rapid patient recovery.

Being the largest Initial Coin Offering project, EOSIO has attracted great interest in cryptocurrency markets. Despite its popularity and prosperity (e.g., 26,311,585,008 token transactions occurred from June 8, 2018 to Aug. 5, 2020), there is almost no work investigating the EOSIO token ecosystem. To fill this gap, we are the first to conduct a systematic investigation of the EOSIO token ecosystem by conducting a comprehensive graph analysis of the entire on-chain EOSIO data (nearly 135 million blocks). We construct token-creator graphs, token-contract creator graphs, token-holder graphs, and token-transfer graphs to characterize token creators, holders, and transfer activities. Through graph analysis, we have obtained many insightful findings and observed some abnormal trading patterns. Moreover, we propose a fake-token detection algorithm to identify tokens generated by fake users or fake transactions and analyze their corresponding manipulation behaviors. Evaluation results also demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Machine Unlearning, a pivotal field addressing data privacy in machine learning, necessitates efficient methods for the removal of private or irrelevant data. In this context, significant challenges arise, particularly in maintaining privacy and ensuring model efficiency when managing outdated, private, and irrelevant data. Such data not only compromises model accuracy but also burdens computational efficiency in both learning and unlearning processes. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a novel framework: Attention-based Machine Unlearning using Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRAMU). This framework incorporates adaptive learning mechanisms, privacy preservation techniques, and optimization strategies, making it a well-rounded solution for handling various data sources, either single-modality or multi-modality, while maintaining accuracy and privacy. FRAMU's strengths include its adaptability in fluctuating data landscapes, its ability to unlearn outdated, private, or irrelevant data, and its support for continual model evolution without compromising privacy. Our experiments, conducted on both single-modality and multi-modality datasets, revealed that FRAMU significantly outperformed baseline models. Additional assessments of convergence behavior and optimization strategies further validate the framework's utility in federated learning applications. Overall, FRAMU advances Machine Unlearning by offering a robust, privacy-preserving solution that optimizes model performance while also addressing key challenges in dynamic data environments.

In terms of the generative process, the Gamma-Gamma-Poisson Process (G2PP) is equivalent to the nonparametric topic model of Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP). Considering the high computational cost of estimating parameters in HDP, a parallel G2PP was developed to generate topics efficiently via multi-threading. Unfortunately, the above model needs to predefine the number of topics. To address this issue, we first propose a Topic Self-Adaptive Model (TSAM) for nonparametric and parallel topic discovery. In TSAM, a monitor-executor mechanism is developed to manage the global topic information using a hierarchical structure of threads. Based on the apparatus of copulas, we further extend our TSAM to TSAMcop for coherent topic modeling by exploiting a copula guided parallel Gibbs sampling algorithm. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of both TSAM and TSAMcop.

With the fast progress in information technologies and artificial intelligence (AI), smart healthcare has gained considerable momentum. By using advanced technologies like AI, smart healthcare aims to promote human beings’ health and well-being throughout their life. As smart healthcare develops, big healthcare data are produced by various sensors, devices, and communication technologies constantly. To deal with these big multi-source data, automatic information fusion becomes crucial. Information fusion refers to the integration of multiple information sources for obtaining more reliable, effective, and precise information to support optimal decision-making. The close study of information fusion for healthcare with the adoption of advanced AI technologies has become an increasingly important and active field of research. The aim of this is to present a systematic description and state-of-the-art understanding of research about information fusion for healthcare with AI. Structural topic modeling was implemented to detect major research topics covered within 351 relevant articles. Annual trends and correlations of the identified topics were also investigated to identify potential future research directions. In addition, the primary research concerns of top countries/regions, institutions, and authors were shown and compared. The findings based on our analyses provide scientific and technological perspectives of research on information fusion for smart health with AI and offer useful insights and implications for its future development. We also provide valuable guidance for researchers and project managers to allocate research resources and promote effective international collaborations.

Researchers have been aware that emotion is not one-hot encoded in emotion-relevant classification tasks, and multiple emotions can coexist in a given sentence. Recently, several works have focused on leveraging a distribution label or a grayscale label of emotions in the classification model, which can enhance the one-hot label with additional information, such as the intensity of other emotions and the correlation between emotions. Such an approach has been proven effective in alleviating the overfitting problem and improving the model robustness by introducing a distribution learning component in the objective function. However, the effect of distribution learning cannot be fully unfolded as it can reduce the model’s discriminative ability within similar emotion categories. For example, “Sad” and “Fear” are both negative emotions. To address such a problem, we proposed a novel emotion extension scheme in the prior work (Li, Chen, Xie, Li, and Tao, 2021). The prior work incorporated fine-grained emotion concepts to build an extended label space, where a mapping function between coarse-grained emotion categories and fine-grained emotion concepts was identified. For example, sentences labeled “Joy” can convey various emotions such as enjoy, free, and leisure. The model can further benefit from the extended space by extracting dependency within fine-grained emotions when yielding predictions in the original label space. The prior work has shown that it is more apt to apply distribution learning in the extended label space than in the original space. A novel sparse connection method, i.e., Leaky Dropout, is proposed in this paper to refine the dependency-extraction step, which further improves the classification performance. In addition to the multiclass emotion classification task, we extensively experimented on sentiment analysis and multilabel emotion prediction tasks to investigate the effectiveness and generality of the label extension schema.

Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved promising results in session-based recommendation. Existing methods typically construct a local session graph and a global session graph to explore complex item transition patterns. However, studies have seldom investigated the repeat consumption phenomenon in a local graph. In addition, it is challenging to retrieve relevant adjacent nodes from the whole training set owing to computational complexity and space constraints. In this study, we use a GNN to jointly model intra- and inter-session item dependencies for session-based recommendations. We construct a repeat-aware local session graph to encode the intra-item dependencies and generate the session representation with positional awareness. Then, we use sessions from the current mini-batch instead of the whole training set to construct a global graph, which we refer to as the session-level global graph. Next, we aggregate the K-nearest neighbors to generate the final session representation, which enables easy and efficient neighbor searching. Extensive experiments on three real-world recommendation datasets demonstrate that RN-GNN outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Blockchain-enabled smart contracts have revolutionized the insurance industry due to their potential to streamline backend operations, mitigate fraudulent claims, and enhance data security and transparency. Guided by the design science methodology, the authors propose two specific smart contract frameworks to enhance insurance claims processing related to vehicle damage claims and personal injury claims. These proposed frameworks can improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of insurance claims processing by automating claims submission, review, analysis, and payment, while reducing fraud and data leakage, by merging various data sources and disintermediation. Furthermore, the authors design a smart contract template supported by eight operational algorithms to facilitate the processing of insurance claims with the help of smart contracts. This template provides practitioners with a standardized prototype for the development of secure and efficient insurance applications.

Sentence representation learning is a crucial task in natural language processing, as the quality of learned representations directly influences downstream tasks, such as sentence classification and sentiment analysis. Transformer-based pretrained language models such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) have been extensively applied to various natural language processing tasks, and have exhibited moderately good performance. However, the anisotropy of the learned embedding space prevents BERT sentence embeddings from achieving good results in the semantic textual similarity tasks. It has been shown that contrastive learning can alleviate the anisotropy problem and significantly improve sentence representation performance. Therefore, there has been a surge in the development of models that utilize contrastive learning to fine-tune BERT-like pretrained language models to learn sentence representations. But no systematic review of contrastive learning models for sentence representations has been conducted. To fill this gap, this article summarizes and categorizes the contrastive learning based sentence representation models, common evaluation tasks for assessing the quality of learned representations, and future research directions. Furthermore, we select several representative models for exhaustive experiments to illustrate the quantitative improvement of various strategies on sentence representations.

In this study, sentiment classification and emotion distribution learning across domains are both formulated as a semi-supervised domain adaptation problem, which utilizes a small amount of labeled documents in the target domain for model training. By introducing a shared matrix that captures the stable association between document clusters and word clusters, non-negative matrix tri-factorization (NMTF) is robust to the labeled target domain data and has shown remarkable performance in cross-domain text classification. However, the existing NMTF-based models ignore the incompatible relationship of sentiment polarities and the relatedness among emotions. Besides, their applications on large-scale datasets are limited by the high computation complexity. To address these issues, we propose a semi-supervised NMTF framework for sentiment classification and emotion distribution learning across domains. Based on a many-to-many mapping between document clusters and sentiment polarities (or emotions), we first incorporate the prior information of label dependency to improve the model performance. Then, we develop a parallel algorithm based on message passing interface (MPI) to further enhance the model scalability. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.

As a novel paradigm for data mining and dimensionality reduction, Non-negative Matrix Tri-Factorization (NMTF) has attracted much attention due to its notable performance and elegant mathematical derivation, and it has been applied to a plethora of real-world applications, such as text data co-clustering. However, the existing NMTF-based methods usually involve intensive matrix multiplications, which exhibits a major limitation of high computational complexity. With the explosion at both the size and the feature dimension of texts, there is a growing need to develop a parallel and scalable NMTF-based algorithm for text data co-clustering. To this end, we first show in this paper how to theoretically derive the original optimization problem of NMTF by introducing the Lagrangian multipliers. Then, we propose to solve the Lagrange dual objective function in parallel through an efficient distributed implementation. Extensive experiments on five benchmark corpora validate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of our distributed parallel update algorithm for an NMTF-based text data co-clustering method.

Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP) has attracted much attention in the research community of natural language processing. Given a corpus, HDP is able to determine the number of topics automatically, possessing an important feature dubbed nonparametric that overcomes the challenging issue of manually specifying a suitable topic number in parametric topic models, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Nevertheless, HDP requires a much higher computational cost than LDA for parameter estimation. By taking the advantage of multi-threading, a parallel Gibbs sampling algorithm is proposed to estimate parameters for HDP based on the equivalence between HDP and Gamma-Gamma Poisson Process (G2PP) in terms of the generative process. Unfortunately, the above parallel Gibbs sampling algorithm requires to apply the finite approximation on the number of topics manually (i.e., predefine the topic number), thus can not retain the nonparametric feature of HDP. Another drawback of the above models is the lack of capturing the semantic dependencies between words, because the topic assignment of words is independent with each other. Although some works have been done in phrase-based topic modelling, these existing methods are still limited by either enforcing the entire phrase to share a common topic or requiring much complex and time-consuming phrase mining methods. In this paper, we aim to develop a copula guided parallel Gibbs sampling algorithm for HDP which can adjust the number of topics dynamically and capture the latent semantic dependencies between words that compose a coherent segment. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets indicate that our method achieves low perplexities and high topic coherence scores with a small time cost. In addition, we validate the effectiveness of our method on the modelling of word semantic dependencies by comparing the extracted topical phrases with those learned by state-of-the-art phrase-based baselines.

Traditional methods of annotating the sentiment of an unlabeled document are based on sentiment lexicons or machine learning algorithms, which have shown low computational cost or competitive performance. However, these methods ignore the semantic composition problem displaying in several ways such as negative reversing and intensification. In this paper, we propose a new method for sentiment classification using negative and intensive sentiment supplementary information, so as to exploit the linguistic feature of negative and intensive words in conjunction with the context information. Particularly, our method can solve the domain-specific problem without relying on the external sentiment lexicons. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

This paper addresses the task of cross-domain social emotion classification of online documents. The cross-domain task is formulated as using abundant labeled documents from a source domain and a small amount of labeled documents from a target domain, to predict the emotion of unlabeled documents in the target domain. Although several cross-domain emotion classification algorithms have been proposed, they require that feature distributions of different domains share a sufficient overlapping, which is hard to meet in practical applications. This paper proposes a novel framework, which uses the emotion distribution of training documents at the cluster level, to alleviate the aforementioned issue. Experimental results on two datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed model on cross-domain social emotion classification.

The rapid growth of population has posed a challenge to people for discovering new followees in uni-directional social networks. Intuitively, a user's adoption of others as followees may motivated by her interest as well as social connection. Therefore, it is worth-while to consider both factors at the same time for better recommendations. Previous recommender works on implicit follow or not feedbacks become unqualified, mainly because of the coarse users' preferences inferring, which cannot distinguish whether one follows the other is based on her social connection or individual interest. In this paper, we present a new user recommendation method which is capable of recommending candidate followees who have similar interest and closer social connection relevant to a target user. As its core, a novel topic model namely UIS-LDA is designed to jointly model a user's preferences with respect to the set of latent interest topics and social topics. The experiments using Twitter dataset proves that our proposed method effective in improving the Precision, Conversion Rate F1 score and NDCG.

With the development of the Internet, user-generated data has been growing tremendously in Web 2.0 era. Facing such a big volume of resources in folksonomy, people need a method of fast exploration and indexing to find their demanded data. To achieve this goal, contextual information is indispensable and valuable to understand user preference and purpose. In sociolinguistics, context can be mainly categorized as verbal context and social context. Comparing with verbal context, social context not only requires domain knowledge to pre-define contextual attributes but also acquires additional data from users. However, there is no research of addressing irrelevant contextual factors for verbal context model so far. The dominating set from verbal context proposed in this paper is to fill this blank. We present the verbal context in folksonomy to capture the user intention, and propose a dominating set discovering method for this verbal context model to prune the irrelevant contextual factors and keep the major characteristics at the same time. Furthermore, the experiments, which are conducted on a public data set, show that the proposed method gives convincing results.