Speaker:   Prof. RAYMOND Y.K. LAU（City University of Hong Kong）
Time:         May.18th.2012, 15:00pm-16:30pm
Venue:        Lecture room, Second floor of B8 Building ,South SCUT
Organizer: School of Software Engineering

Abstract：
Since manually constructing domain-specific sentiment lexicons is extremely time consuming and it may not even be feasible for domains where linguistic expertise is not available, research on automatic construction of domain-specific sentiment lexicons has become a hot topic in recent years. The main contribution of our research is the illustration of a novel semi-supervised learning method which exploits both term-to-term and document-to-term relations hidden in a corpus for the construction of domain-specific sentiment lexicons. More specifically, the proposed two-pass pseudo labeling method combines shallow linguistic parsing and corpus-based statistical learning to make domain-specific sentiment extraction scalable with respect to the sheer volume of opinionated documents archived on the Internet these days. Another novelty of the proposed method is that it can utilize the readily available user-contributed labels of opinionated documents (e.g., the user ratings of product reviews) to bootstrap the performance of domain-specific sentiment lexicon construction. Our experiments show that the proposed method can generate high quality domain-specific sentiment lexicons assessed by human experts directly. The proposed method has also been applied to predict the sales of consumer products in e-Commerce. Our research opens the door to the development of practical and scalable computational methods for domain-specific sentiment analysis.

Introduction of RAYMOND Y.K. LAU:
RAYMOND Y.K. LAU is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems at City University of Hong Kong. He has worked at the academia and the ICT industry of Hong Kong and Australia for over twenty years. He is the author of over 100 refereed international journals and conference papers. His research work has been published in renowned journals such as ACM Transactions on Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Internet Computing, Computational Intelligence, Journal of MIS, Decision Support Systems, etc. His research interests include Information Retrieval, Text Mining, and Agent-Mediated e-Commerce. He is the associate editor of the International Journal of Systems and Service-Oriented Engineering. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM respectively.