L'humanité a longtemps été passionnée par la création de machines intellectuelles qui peuvent librement intéragir avec nous dans notre langue. Tous les systèmes modernes qui communiquent directement avec l'utilisateur partagent une caractéristique commune: ils ont un système de dialogue à la base. Aujourd'hui pratiquement tous les composants d'un système de dialogue ont adopté des méthodes statistiques et les utilisent largement comme leurs modèles de base. Jusqu'à récemment la génération de langage naturel (GLN) utilisait pour la plupart des patrons/modèles codés manuellement, qui représentaient des phrases types mappées à des réalisations sémantiques particulières. C'était le cas jusqu'à ce que les approches statistiques aient envahi la communauté de recherche en systèmes de dialogue. Dans cette thèse, nous suivons cette ligne de recherche et présentons une nouvelle approche à la génération de la langue naturelle. Au cours de notre travail, nous nous concentrons sur deux aspects importants du développement des systèmes de génération: construire un générateur performant et diversifier sa production. Deux idées principales que nous défendons ici sont les suivantes: d'abord, la tâche de GLN peut être vue comme la traduction entre une langue naturelle et une représentation formelle de sens, et en second lieu, l'extension du corpus qui impliquait traditionnellement des paraphrases définies manuellement et des règles spécialisées peut être effectuée automatiquement en utilisant des méthodes automatiques d'extraction des synonymes et des paraphrases bien connues et largement utilisées. En ce qui concerne notre première idée, nous étudions la possibilité d'utiliser le cadre de la traduction automatique basé sur des modèles ngrams; nous explorons également le potentiel de l'apprentissage discriminant (notamment les champs aléatoires markoviens) appliqué à la GLN; nous construisons un système de génération qui permet l'inclusion et la combinaison des différents modèles et qui utilise un cadre de décodage efficace (automate à état fini). En ce qui concerne le second objectif, qui est l'extension du corpus, nous proposons d'élargir la taille du vocabulaire et le nombre de l'ensemble des structures syntaxiques disponibles via l'intégration des synonymes et des paraphrases. À notre connaissance, il n'y a pas eu de tentatives d'augmenter la taille du vocabulaire d'un système de GLN en incorporant les synonymes. À ce jour, la plupart d'études sur l'extension du corpus visent les paraphrases et recourent au crowdsourcing pour les obtenir, ce qui nécessite une validation supplémentaire effectuée par les développeurs du système. Nous montrons que l'extension du corpus au moyen d'extraction automatique de paraphrases et la validation automatique sont tout aussi efficaces, étant en même temps moins coûteux en termes de temps de développement et de ressources. Au cours d'expériences intermédiaires nos modèles ont montré une meilleure performance que celle obtenue par le modèle de référence basé sur les syntagmes et se sont révélés d'être plus robustes, pour le traitement des combinaisons inconnues de concepts, que le générateur à base des règles. L'évaluation humaine finale a prouvé que les modèles représent une alternative solide au générateur à base des règles / The humanity has long been passionate about creating intellectual machines that can freely communicate with us in our language. Most modern systems communicating directly with the user share one common feature: they have a dialog system (DS) at their base. As of today almost all DS components embraced statistical methods and widely use them as their core models. Until recently Natural Language Generation (NLG) component of a dialog system used primarily hand-coded generation templates, which represented model phrases in a natural language mapped to a particular semantic content. Today data-driven models are making their way into the NLG domain. In this thesis, we follow along this new line of research and present several novel data-driven approaches to natural language generation. In our work we focus on two important aspects of NLG systems development: building an efficient generator and diversifying its output. Two key ideas that we defend here are the following: first, the task of NLG can be regarded as the translation between a natural language and a formal meaning representation, and therefore, can be performed using statistical machine translation techniques, and second, corpus extension and diversification which traditionally involved manual paraphrasing and rule crafting can be performed automatically using well-known and widely used synonym and paraphrase extraction methods. Concerning our first idea, we investigate the possibility of using NGRAM translation framework and explore the potential of discriminative learning, notably Conditional Random Fields (CRF) models, as applied to NLG; we build a generation pipeline which allows for inclusion and combination of different generation models (NGRAM and CRF) and which uses an efficient decoding framework (finite-state transducers' best path search). Regarding the second objective, namely corpus extension, we propose to enlarge the system's vocabulary and the set of available syntactic structures via integrating automatically obtained synonyms and paraphrases into the training corpus. To our knowledge, there have been no attempts to increase the size of the system vocabulary by incorporating synonyms. To date most studies on corpus extension focused on paraphrasing and resorted to crowd-sourcing in order to obtain paraphrases, which then required additional manual validation often performed by system developers. We prove that automatic corpus extension by means of paraphrase extraction and validation is just as effective as crowd-sourcing, being at the same time less costly in terms of development time and resources. During intermediate experiments our generation models showed a significantly better performance than the phrase-based baseline model and appeared to be more robust in handling unknown combinations of concepts than the current in-house rule-based generator. The final human evaluation confirmed that our data-driven NLG models is a viable alternative to rule-based generators.

Natural language processing (NLP) opens the possibilities for a computer to read, decipher, and interpret human languages to eventually use it in ways that enable yet further understanding of the interaction and communication between the human and the computer. When appropriate data is available, NLP makes it possible to determine not only the sentiment information of a text but also information about the author behind an online post. Previously conducted studies show aspects of NLP potentially going deeper into the subjective information, enabling author classification from text data. This thesis addresses the lack of demographic insights of online user data by studying language use in texts. It compares four popular yet diverse machine learning algorithms for gender and age segmentation. During the project, the age analysis was abandoned due to insufficient data. The online texts were analysed and quantified into 118 parameters based on linguistic differences. Using supervised learning, the researchers succeeded in correctly predicting the gender in 82% of the cases when analysing data from English online users. The training and test data may have some correlations, which is important to notice. Language is complex and, in this case, the more complex methods SVM and Neural networks were performing better than the less complex Naive Bayes and Logistic regression.

Many software companies use issue tracking systems to organize their work. However, when working on large projects, across multiple teams, a problem of finding the correctteam to solve a certain issue arises. One team might detect a problem, which must be solved by another team. This can take time from employees tasked with finding the correct team and automating the dispatching of these issues can have large benefits for the company. In this thesis, the use of machine learning methods, mainly convolutional neural networks (CNN) for text classification, has been applied to this problem. For natural language processing both word- and character-level representations are commonly used. The results in this thesis suggests that the CNN learns different information based on whether word- or character-level representation is used. Furthermore, it was concluded that the CNN models performed on similar levels as the classical Support Vector Machine for this task. When compared to a human expert, working with dispatching issues, the best CNN model performed on a similar level when given the same information. The high throughput of a computer model, therefore, suggests automation of this task is very much possible.

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt das Design und die Implementierung eines Algorithmus zur Flexion. Es wird am Beispiel des Deutschen eine konkrete Implementierung entwickelt. Hierfür findet zunächst eine ausführliche Analyse der Flexion des Deutschen statt, bevor ein Verfahren erarbeitet wird, das sprachunabhängig ist und somit prinzipiell auf andere Sprachen übertragen werden kann. Die tatsächliche Machbarkeit des Verfahrens wird anhand von Beispielen nachgewiesen. Die hohe Komplexität der Aufgabe führt allerdings dazu, dass es in der Praxis zu Abstrichen bei der Qualität der flektierten Wortformen kommt. Dies ist insbesondere deswegen der Fall, da das entwickelte System auch ihm unbekannte Grundformen flektiert.

Multimodal machine learning is a subfield of machine learning that aims to relate data from different modalities, such as texts and images. One of the many applications that could be built upon this technique is an image retrieval system that, given a text query, retrieves suitable images from a database. In this thesis, a retrieval system based on canonical correlation is used to suggest images for news articles. Different dense text representations produced by Word2vec and Doc2vec, and image representations produced by pre-trained convolutional neural networks are explored to find out how they affect the suggestions. Which part of an article is best suited as a query to the system is also studied. Also, experiments are carried out to determine if an article's date of publication can be used to improve the suggestions. The results show that Word2vec outperforms Doc2vec in the task, which indicates that the meaning of article texts are not as important as the individual words they consist of. Furthermore, the queries are improved by rewarding words that are particularly significant.

System log files are filled with logged events, status codes, and other messages. By analyzing the log files, the systems current state can be determined, and find out if something during its execution went wrong. Log file analysis has been studied for some time now, where recent studies have shown state-of-the-art performance using machine learning techniques. In this thesis, document classification solutions were tested on log files in order to classify regular system runs versus abnormal system runs. To solve this task, supervised and unsupervised learning methods were combined. Doc2Vec was used to extract document features, and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based architectures on the classification task. With the use of the machine learning models and preprocessing techniques the tested models yielded an f1-score and accuracy above 95% when classifying log files.

The thesis introduces a proof of concept idea that could spark great interest from many industries. The idea consists of a remote Natural Language Interface (NLI), for querying Knowledge Bases (KBs). The system applies natural language technology tools provided by the Stanford CoreNLP, and queries KBs with the use of the query language SPARQL. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used to analyze the semantics of a question written in natural language, and generates relational information about the question. With correctly defined relations, the question can be queried on KBs containing relevant Linked Data. The Linked Data follows the Resource Description Framework (RDF) model by expressing relations in the form of semantic triples: subject-predicate-object. With our NLI, any KB can be understood semantically. By providing correct training data, the AI can learn to understand the semantics of the RDF data stored in the KB. The ability to understand the RDF data allows for the process of extracting relational information from questions about the KB. With the relational information, questions can be translated to SPARQL and be queried on the KB.

Detta arbete undersöker hur språkmodellen BERT och en MaLSTM-arkitektur fungerar att för att identifiera parafraser ur 'Microsoft Paraphrase Research Corpus' (MPRC) om dessa tränats på automatiskt identifierade parafraser ur 'Paraphrase Database' (PPDB). Metoderna ställs mot varandra för att undersöka vilken som presterar bäst och metoden att träna på maskinklassificerad data för att användas på mänskligt klassificerad data utvärderas i förhållande till annan klassificering av samma dataset. Meningsparen som används för att träna modellerna hämtas från de högst rankade parafraserna ur PPDB och genom en genereringsmetod som skapar icke-parafraser ur samma dataset. I resultatet visar sig BERT vara kapabel till att identifiera en del parafraser ur MPRC, medan MaLSTM-arkitekturen inte klarade av detta trots förmåga att särskilja på parafraser och icke-parafraser under träning. Både BERT och MaLSTM presterade sämre på att identifiera parafraser ur MPRC än modeller som till exempel StructBERT, som tränat och utvärderats på samma dataset, presterar. Anledningar till att MaLSTM inte klarar av uppgiften diskuteras och främst lyfts att meningarna från icke-parafraserna ur träningsdatan är för olika varandra i förhållande till hur de ser ut i MPRC. Slutligen diskuteras vikten av att forska vidare på hur man kan använda sig av maskinframtagna parafraser inom parafraseringsrelaterad forskning.

This paper aims to show how User Generated Content can create value for Smart Tourism Destinations. Applying the analysis on 5 different cases in the region of Stockholm to derive patterns and opportunities of value creation generated by UGC in tourism. Findings of this paper is also discussed in terms of improving decision making, possibilities of new business models and importance of technological improvements on STD’s. Finally, thoughts on models are presented for researchers and practitioners that might be interested in exploitation of UGC in the context of information-intensive industries and mainly in Tourism.

Text classification is a fundamental part of natural language processing. In this thesis, methods for text classification are used in an attempt to predict the political party affiliation of members of parliament (MPs). The objective is to evaluate the performance of Support Vector Machines (SVM), naive Bayes, and a fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model in predicting MPs' political party affiliation based on speeches given in the Chamber of the Swedish Parliament. This study shows that BERT outperforms SVM and naive Bayes in correctly classifying MPs, and SVM makes better predictions than naive Bayes and performs reasonably well compared to BERT. The results show that all models correctly predict MPs representing the Sweden Democrats to the highest degree. Both BERT and SVM roughly classify every other speech correctly, which implies much better than making random predictions. These results indicate the potential use of methods for automatically classifying political speeches.