According to the World Health Organization, mental health is an integral part of health and well-being. Mental illness can affect anyone, rich or poor, male or female. One such example of mental illness is depression. In Canada 5.3% of the population had presented a depressive episode in the past 12 months. Depression is difficult to diagnose, resulting in high under-diagnosis. Diagnosing depression is often based on self-reported experiences, behaviors reported by relatives, and a mental status examination. Currently, author- ities use surveys and questionnaires to identify individuals who may be at risk of depression. This process is time-consuming and costly. We propose an automated system that can identify at-risk users from their public social media activity. More specifically, we identify at-risk users from Twitter. To achieve this goal we trained a user-level classifier using Support Vector Machine (SVM) that can detect at-risk users with a recall of 0.8750 and a precision of 0.7778. We also trained a tweet-level classifier that predicts if a tweet indicates distress. This task was much more difficult due to the imbalanced data. In the dataset that we labeled, we came across 5% distress tweets and 95% non-distress tweets. To handle this class imbalance, we used undersampling methods. The resulting classifier uses SVM and performs with a recall of 0.8020 and a precision of 0.1237. Our system can be used by authorities to find a focused group of at-risk users. It is not a platform for labeling an individual as a patient with depres- sion, but only a platform for raising an alarm so that the relevant authorities could take necessary interventions to further analyze the predicted user to confirm his/her state of mental health. We respect the ethical boundaries relating to the use of social media data and therefore do not use any user identification information in our research.

Ingeniero Civil Industrial / El siguiente trabajo tiene como objetivo general dise~nar e implementar un módulo clasificador de texto que permita identificar la presencia de ironía en el contenido generado por usuarios de Twitter, mediante el uso de herramientas asociadas a Opinion Mining y Machine Learning. La ironía es un fenómeno que forma parte del contenido generado por las personas en la Web, y representa un campo de estudio nuevo que ha atraído la atención de algunos investigadores del área de Opinion Mining debido a su complejidad y al impacto que puede tener en el desempeño de las aplicaciones de Análisis de Sentimientos actuales. Este trabajo de título se desarrolla dentro del marco de OpinionZoom, proyecto CORFO código 13IDL2-23170 titulado "OpinionZoom: Plataforma de análisis de sentimientos e ironía a partir de la información textual en redes sociales para la caracterización de la demanda de productos y servicios" desarrollado en el Web Intelligence Centre del Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial de la Facultad de Ciencias Físicas y Matemáticas de la Universidad de Chile, el cual busca generar un sistema avanzado para analizar datos extraídos desde redes sociales para obtener información relevante para las empresas en relación a sus productos y servicios. La hipótesis de investigación de este trabajo dice que es posible detectar la presencia de ironía en texto en idioma Español con cierto nivel de precisión, utilizando una adaptación de la metodología propuesta por Reyes et al. (2013) en [5] la cual involucra la construcción de un corpus en función de la estructura de Twitter junto con la capacidad de las personas para detectar ironía. El modelo utilizado se compone de 11 atributos entre los cuales se rescatan características sintácticas, semánticas y emocionales o psicológicas, con el objetivo de poder describir ironía en texto. Para esto, se genera un corpus de casos irónicos y no irónicos a partir de una selección semiautomática utilizando una serie de hashtags en Twitter, para luego validar su etiquetado utilizando evaluadores humanos. Además, esto se complementa con la inclusión de textos objetivos como parte del set de casos no irónicos. Luego, utilizando este corpus, se pretende realizar el entrenamiento de un algoritmo de aprendizaje supervisado para realizar la posterior clasificación de texto. Para ésto, se implementa un módulo de extracción de atributos que transforma cada texto en un vector representativo de los atributo. Finalmente, se utilizan los vectores obtenidos para implementar un módulo clasificador de texto, el cual permite realizar una clasificación entre tipos irónicos y no irónicos de texto. Para probar su desempe~no, se realizan dos pruebas. La primera utiliza como casos no irónicos los textos objetivos y la segunda utiliza como casos no irónicos aquellos textos evaluados por personas como tales. La primera obtuvo un alto nivel de precisión, mientras que la segunda fue insuficiente. En base a los resultados se concluye que esta implementación no es una solución absoluta. Existen algunas limitaciones asociadas a la construcción del corpus, las herramientas utilizadas e incluso el modelo, sin embargo, los resultados muestran que bajo ciertos escenarios de comparación, es posible detectar ironía en texto por lo que se cumple la hipótesis. Se sugiere ampliar la investigación, mejorar la obtención del corpus, utilizar herramientas más desarrolladas y analizar aquellos elementos que el modelo no puede capturar.

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Shared micromobility defines as the shared use of light and low-speed vehicles such as bike and scooter in which users have short-term access on an as-needed basis. As shared micromobility, as one of the most viable and sustainable modes of transportation, has emerged in the U.S. over the last decade., understanding different aspects of these modes of transportation help decision-makers and stakeholders to have better insights into the problems related to these transportation options. Designing efficient and effective shared micromobility programs improves overall system performance, enhances accessibility, and is essential to increase ridership and benefit commuters. This dissertation aims to address three vital aspects of emerging shared micromobility transportation options with three essays that each contribute to the practice and literature of sustainable transportation. Chapter one of this dissertation investigates public opinion towards dockless bikes sharing using a mix of statistical and natural language processing methods. This study finds the underlying topics and the corresponding polarity in public discussion by analyzing tweets to give better insight into the emerging phenomenon across the U.S. Chapter two of this dissertation proposes a new framework for the micromobility network to improve accessibility and reduce operator costs. The framework focuses on highly centralized clubs (known as k-club) as virtual docking hubs. The study suggests an integer programming model and a heuristic approach as well as a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed model. Chapter three of this dissertation address the risk perception of bicycle and scooter riders’ risky behaviors. This study investigates twenty dangerous maneuvers and their corresponding frequency and severity from U.S. resident’s perspective. The resultant risk matrix and regression model provides a clear picture of the public risk perception associated with these two micromobility options. Overall, the research outcomes will provide decision-makers and stakeholders with scientific information, practical implications, and necessary tools that will enable them to offer better and sustainable micromobility services to their residents.

Twitter and other microblogging services are a valuable source for almost real-time marketing, public opinion and brand-related consumer information mining. As such, collection and analysis of user-generated natural language content is in the focus of research regarding automated sentiment analysis. The most successful approach in the field is supervised machine learning, where the three key problems are data cleaning and transformation, feature generation and model choice and training parameter selection. Papers in recent years thoroughly examined the field and there is a agreement that relatively simple techniques as bag-of-words transformation of text and a naive bayes models can generate acceptable results (between 75% and 85% percent F1-scores for an average dataset) and fine tuning can be really difficult and yields relatively small results. However, a few percent in performance even on a middle-size dataset can mean thousands of better classified documents, which can mean thousands of missed sales or angry customers in any business domain. Thus this work presents and demonstrates a framework for better tailored, fine-tuned models for analysing twitter data. The experiments show that Naive Bayes classifiers with domain specific stopword selection work the best (up to 88% F1-score), however the performance dramatically decreases if the data is unbalanced or the classes are not binary. Filtering stopwords is crucial to increase prediction performance; and the experiment shows that a stopword set should be domain-specific. The conclusion is that there is no one best way for model training and stopword selection in sentiment analysis. Thus the work suggests that there is space for using a comparison framework to fine-tune prediction models to a given problem: such a comparison framework should compare different training settings on the same dataset, so the best trained models can be found for a given real-life problem.

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This paper aims to measure, compare and model Sovereign Risk. The risk position of South Africa compared to Emerging Markets as well as in comparison to Developed Markets is considered. Particular interest is taken in how the South African Sovereign Risk environment, and its associated determinants, differs and conforms to that of other Emerging Markets. This effectively highlights how the South African economy is similar to the Emerging Markets and where it behaves differently. Regression, optimisation techniques, dimension reduction techniques as well as Machine Learning techniques, through the use of sentiment analysis, is utilised in this research.

Customer reviews are important for both customers and companies. Customers want to find out if the product or service is what they need while companies want to figure out if their product is good enough for their customers. There is, however, an issue where customers very rarely write a product review. An example of a solution for this could be to let the customer choose between adjectives rather than write the entire review. To help future researchers find out if this could make customers more prone to write reviews, this study looks at the correlation between the sentiment and the rating, as well as the adjectives used when a rating and sentiment correlate. Other studies look at the correlation, or the precision of the tool used for sentiment analysis but do not go in-depth on what makes a review correlate with its rating. To study this, four datasets of reviews were used with a total of 105234 reviews. Then, using Stanford CoreNLP each review text got a predicted sentiment score. The Pearson coefficient was then used to find the correlation coefficient between ratings and sentiments. The conclusion is that there is a weak-moderate correlation between ratings and sentiment. Adjectives with a positive sentiment had a higher correlation than negative adjectives, however, most of them still had a low correlation. The sentiment correlates better when the reviews with only one sentence are omitted from the result.

Throughout history, the Black Diaspora has used fashion as a form of protest. The element of fashion is often overlooked when considering the history and struggle for Black equality, because it is less tangible or definable in terms of its influence and effect, but it is still important because Black males resist the dominant culture via dress by dressing in military uniforms, creating their own style, and using different colors in their dress. Studying the Black struggle in American history during specific periods is one way to better understand opposition to the majority culture through fashion. We should also consider the mood of a social system when examining the dress of a particular group during conflicts. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate the role of fashion as a protest tool against the majority culture, and the social mood that affects the fashion choices of Black males. The study focuses on Black fashion from 1910 to 2015. Text data were collected and analyzed from articles published in The Crisis magazine, and men's fashion was specially examined. Additionally, images were studied via visual ethnography and images were coded based on color choice, fit, and accessories. For conducting sentiment analysis, lexicons were used, and the text was examined for negative sentiment. The overall negative sentiment of the document was obtained. Graphical analyses are included to present the findings. The findings, conclusions, limitations, and future research are discussed.

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