What Makes Your Writing Style Unique? Significant Differences Between Two Famous Romanian Orators

This paper presents research of an application of a latent semantic analysis (LSA) model for the automatic evaluation of short answers (25 to 70 words) to open-ended questions. In order to reach a viable application of this LSA model, the research goals were as follows: (1) to develop robustness, (2) to increase accuracy, and (3) to widen portability. The methods consisted of the following tasks: firstly, the implementation of word bigrams; secondly, the implementation of combined models of unigrams and bigrams using multiple linear regression; and, finally, the addition of an adjustment step after the score attribution taking into consideration the average of the words of the answers. The corpus was composed by 359 answers produced according to two questions from a Brazilian public university’s entrance examination, which were previously scored by human evaluators. The results demonstrate that the experiments produced accuracy about 84.94 %, while the accuracy of the two human evaluators was about 84.93 %. In conclusion, it can be seen that the automatic evaluation technology shows that it is reaching a high level of efficiency.

We present Topic View, an application for visually comparing and exploring multiple models of text corpora. Topic View uses multiple linked views to visually analyze both the conceptual content and the document relationships in models generated using different algorithms. To illustrate Topic View, we apply it to models created using two standard approaches: Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Conceptual content is compared through the combination of (i) a bipartite graph matching LSA concepts with LDA topics based on the cosine similarities of model factors and (ii) a table containing the terms for each LSA concept and LDA topic listed in decreasing order of importance. Document relationships are examined through the combination of (i) side-by-side document similarity graphs, (ii) a table listing the weights for each document's contribution to each concept/topic, and (iii) a full text reader for documents selected in either of the graphs or the table. We demonstrate the utility of Topic View's visual approach to model assessment by comparing LSA and LDA models of two example corpora.

In recent years, latent semantic analysis (LSA) has reached a level of maturity at which its presence is ubiquitous in technology as well as in simulation of cognitive processes. In spite of this, in recent years there has been a trend of subjecting LSA to some criticisms, usually because it is compared to other models in very specific tasks and conditions and sometimes without having good knowledge of what the semantic representation of LSA means, and without exploiting all the possibilities of which LSA is capable other than the cosine. This paper provides a critical review to clarify some of the misunderstandings regarding LSA and other space models. The historical stability of the predecessors of LSA, the representational structure of word meaning and the multiple topologies that could arise from a semantic space, the computation of similarity, the myth that LSA dimensions have no meaning, the computational and algorithm plausibility to account for meaning acquisition in LSA (in contrast to others models based on online mechanisms), the possibilities of spatial models to substantiate recent proposals, and, in general, the characteristics of classic vector models and their ease and flexibility to simulate some cognitive phenomena will be reviewed. The review highlights the similarity between LSA and other techniques and proposes using long LSA experiences in other models, especially in predicting models such as word2vec. In sum, it emphasizes the lessons that can be learned from comparing LSA-based models to other models, rather than making statements about "the best."

Topic modeling is the statistical model for discovering hidden topics or keywords in a collection of documents. Topic modeling is also considered a probabilistic model for learning, analyzing, and discovering topics from the document collection. The most popular techniques for topic modeling are latent semantic analysis (LSA), probabilistic latent semantic analysis (pLSA), latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and the recent deep learning-based lda2vec. LDA is most commonly used in extractive multi-document summarization to determine whether the extracted sentence reflects the concept of the input document. In this paper, we will try to explore various multi-document summarization techniques that use LDA as a topic modeling method for improving final summary coverage and to reduce redundancy. Finally, we compared LDA and LSA using the Genism toolkit, and our experiment results show that LDA outperforms LSA if we increase the number of features considered for sentence selection.KeywordsTopic modelingText summarizationLDALSA

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) has gained a steadily increasing role as it helps students to better comprehend through its synergistic effect, mediated by technology. In line with CSCL learning paradigm, our approach is centered on creativity stimulation which is facilitated by a deeper understanding of the dialog. This paper introduces new extended views for our ReaderBench framework, as well as a novel recommendations engine. Our General Morphological Analysis (GMA) implementation is based on the keywords extraction mechanism provided by ReaderBench, alongside with the similar concepts inferred using the lexicalized ontology WordNet, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), and Latent Dirichlet Analysis (LDA) semantic models. We also include a comprehensive case study to detail the new processing workflows that integrate voices (i.e., participants’ points of view), keywords identification, and text cohesion in order to recommend personalized learning resources.

Funding agencies such as the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of The National Academies make their online grant databases publicly available which document a variety of information on grants that have been funded over the past few decades. In this paper, based on a quantitative analysis of the TRB’s Research In Progress (RIP) online database, we explore the feasibility of automatically estimating the appropriate funding level, given the textual description of a transportation research project. We use statistical Text Mining (TM) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies to build this model using the 14,000 or more records of the TRB’s RIP research grants big data. Several Natural Language Processing (NLP) based text representation models such as the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and the Doc2Vec Machine Learning (ML) approach are used to vectorize the project descriptions and generate semantic vectors. Each of these representations is then used to train supervised regression models such as Random Forest (RF) regression. Out of the three latent feature generation models, we found LDA gives the least Mean Absolute Error (MAE) using 300 feature dimensions and RF regression model. However, based on the correlation coefficients, it was found that it is not very feasible to accurately predict the funding level directly from the unstructured project abstract, given the large variations in source agencies, subject areas, and funding levels. By using separate prediction models for different types of funding agencies, funding levels were better correlated with the project abstract.

A questionnaire text mining model is built based on latent semantic analysis (LSA). Take open questionnaire as the research object and improve Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model according to the text characteristics, a BM25-LDA model is built. By comparing the LDA model and BM25-LDA model on the open questionnaire text, we can verify that the performance of BM25-LDA mode is better than that of original LDA model.

The intelligent task of semantically assigning a paper to a reviewer with respect to his knowledge domain remains a challenging task in academic conferences. From literature, a number of automated reviewer assignment systems have been presented which are based on distributional semantic models such as Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) have been used to capture semantics. Thus, this study presents the comparative study of the three models based on their derived suitability scores between a paper meant for review and a reviewer’s representation papers. From the experimental results obtained, it shows that TF-IDF outperformed the accuracy level of the other two models by a substantial margin.

Exploring potentially useful information from huge amount of textual data produced by microblogging services has attracted much attention in recent years. An important preprocessing step of microblog text mining is to convert natural language texts into proper numerical representations. Due to the short-length characteristics of microblog texts, using term frequency vectors to represent microblog texts will cause “sparse data” problem. Finding proper representations of microblog texts is a challenging issue. In this paper, we apply deep networks to map the high-dimensional representations of microblog texts to low-dimensional representations. To improve the result of dimensionality reduction, we take advantage of the semantic similarity derived from two types of microblogspecific information, namely the retweet relationship and hashtags. Two types of approaches, including modifying training data and modifying the training objective of deep networks, are proposed to make use of microblog-specific information. Experiment results show that the deep models perform better than traditional dimensionality reduction methods such as latent semantic analysis and latent Dirichlet allocation topic model, and the use of microblog-specific information can help to learn better representations.

Multi-faceted book search engine presents diverse category-style options to allow users to refine search results without re-entering a query. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-faceted book search engine that utilizes users' query-related latent intents mined from click-through logs as multiple facets for books. The latent query intents can be effectively and efficiently discovered by applying the Sparse Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) model to users' query and clicking behaviors in the click-through logs. This paper presents the details to improve the multi-faceted book search by incorporating the compact representation of query-intent-book relationships generated by Sparse LSA into the off-line and online processing procedures. The specificity of latent query intents can be flexibly changed by adjusting the sparsity level of projection matrix in the Sparse LSA model. We evaluated our approach on CADAL click-through logs containing 45,892 queries and 164,822 books. The experimental results show the Sparse LSA model with more sparse projection matrix tends to discover the more specific latent query intents. The latent query intents suggested by our approach usually gain the high user satisfaction ratio.

The demand of scoring natural language responses has created a need for new computational tools that can be applied to automatically grade student essays. Systems for automatic essay assessment have been commercially available since 1990's. However, the progress in the field was obstructed by a lack of qualitative information regarding the effectiveness of such systems. Most of the research in automatic essay grading has been associated with English writing due to its widespread use and the availability of more learner collection and language processing software for the language. In addition, there is large number of commercial software for grading programming assignments automatically. In this work, we investigate document semantic similarity based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We use an open-source Python software, Gensim, to develop and implement an essay grading system able to compare an essay to an answer-key and assign to it a grade based on semantic similarity between the two. We test our tool on variable-size essays and conduct experimental tests to compare the results obtained from human grader (professor) and those obtained from the automatic grading system. Results show high correlation between the professor grades and the grades assigned by both modeling techniques. However, LSA-based modeling showed more promising results than the LDA-based method.

To support program comprehension, software artifacts can be labeled--for example within software visualization tools--with a set of representative words, hereby referred to as labels. Such labels can be obtained using various approaches, including Information Retrieval (IR) methods or other simple heuristics. They provide a bird-eye's view of the source code, allowing developers to look over software components fast and make more informed decisions on which parts of the source code they need to analyze in detail. However, few empirical studies have been conducted to verify whether the extracted labels make sense to software developers. This paper investigates (i) to what extent various IR techniques and other simple heuristics overlap with (and differ from) labeling performed by humans; (ii) what kinds of source code terms do humans use when labeling software artifacts; and (iii) what factors--in particular what characteristics of the artifacts to be labeled--influence the performance of automatic labeling techniques. We conducted two experiments in which we asked a group of students (38 in total) to label 20 classes from two Java software systems, JHotDraw and eXVantage. Then, we analyzed to what extent the words identified with an automated technique--including Vector Space Models, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), as well as customized heuristics extracting words from specific source code elements--overlap with those identified by humans. Results indicate that, in most cases, simpler automatic labeling techniques--based on the use of words extracted from class and method names as well as from class comments--better reflect human-based labeling. Indeed, clustering-based approaches (LSI and LDA) are more worthwhile to be used for source code artifacts having a high verbosity, as well as for artifacts requiring more effort to be manually labeled. The obtained results help to define guidelines on how to build effective automatic labeling techniques, and provide some insights on the actual usefulness of automatic labeling techniques during program comprehension tasks.

Stack Overflow has undoubtedly become a big trend among the programmers and researchers. The problems or doubts faced by any programmer are put on this forum making it available to many knowledgeable people and hence giving out possibly correct solutions. This paper focuses on Tag based Answer Recommendation System on Stack Overflow. This model follows Topic Modeling methodology wherein two techniques were attempted, i.e., LSA(Latent semantic analysis) and LDA(Latent Dirichlet Allocation). These methods deal with various User Queries to find out the most similar questions from the database and hence, deliver the most valid answers related to the question as output. The results from both the Topic Modeling techniques were analyzed with the help of Cosine Similarity as metrics and hence, we found out that LDA performed better than LSA, thereby giving better and more accurate results.

Web transaction data between web visitors and web functionalities usually convey users’ task-oriented behavior patterns. Clustering web transactions, thus, may capture such informative knowledge, in turn, build user profiles, which are associated with different navigational patterns. For some advanced web applications, such as web recommendation or personalization, the aforementioned work is crucial to make web users get their preferred information accurately. On the other hand, the conventional web usage mining techniques for clustering web objects often perform clustering on usage data directly rather than take the underlying semantic relationships among the web objects into account. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) model is a commonly used approach for capturing semantic associations among co-occurrence observations.. In this paper, we propose a LSA-based approach for such purpose. We demonstrated usability and scalability of the proposed approach through performing experiments on two real world datasets. The experimental results have validated the method’s effectiveness in comparison with some previous studies.KeywordsReal World DatasetUser SessionVery Large Data BaseUser TransactionSingle Value DecompositionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

While online peer review’s impact on EFL argumentative writing has been widely studied, its role in shaping narrative writing remains underexplored. This study investigated changes in cohesion and coherence in EFL learners’ narrative writing following online peer review. Thirty first-year English majors in China completed a two-round narrative writing task on the Peerceptiv platform. Subjective peer ratings and objective Coh-Metrix indices were analyzed. Due to non-normal data distribution, bootstrapped paired-samples t -tests with 10,000 resamples were employed to compare writing drafts. Results revealed selective changes in cohesion and coherence indices. Subjective Peerceptiv ratings showed significant gains in Topic Sentence and Organization (cohesion), and in Emotion and Concluding Part (coherence), suggesting improvements in local and meaning-focused aspects in narrative writing. However, Focus and Transition remained unchanged, indicating EFL learners’ difficulty with text-level control. Objective Coh-Metrix analysis revealed increased use of overall (CNCALL) and causal connectives (CNCCaus), and decreased adjacent sentence stem overlap (CRFSO1) under cohesion indices, suggesting more lexical variety. Only causal cohesion (SMCAUSr) improved among coherence indices; Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and other situation model measures remained stable, reflecting limited influence on deeper semantic integration. These findings suggest that peer review may support cohesion and coherence development in EFL narrative writing, especially when supported by rubrics that balance local and global features. Given the limited change in deeper semantic coherence and the study’s exploratory design, future research with extended interventions and comparison groups is recommended.