Distinguished Lecture Series, UMBC Department of Information Systems

Statistical Methods for Integration and Analysis of Opinionated Text Data

Dr. ChengXiang Zhai
Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

10:00am Thursday 21 April 2016, ITE 459, UMBC

Opinionated text data such as blogs, forum posts, product reviews and online comments are increasingly available on the Web. They are very useful sources for public opinions about virtually any topics. However, because the opinions are scattered and abundant, it is a significant challenge for users to collect all the opinions about a topic and digest them efficiently. In this talk, I will present a suite of general statistical text mining methods that can help users integrate, summarize and analyze scattered online opinions to obtain actionable knowledge for decision making. Specifically, I will first present approaches to integration of scattered opinions by aligning them to a well- structured article or relevant ontology. Second, I will discuss several techniques for generating a concise opinion summary that can reveal the major sentiments and opinion points buried in large amounts of opinionated text data. Finally, I will present probabilistic generative models for analyzing review data in depth to discover latent aspect ratings and relative weights placed by reviewers on different aspects. These methods are general and can thus potentially help users integrate and analyze large amounts of online opinionated text data on any topic in any natural language

ChengXiang Zhai is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also holds a joint appointment at the Institute for Genomic Biology, Statistics, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and bioinformatics, and has published over 200 papers in these areas with an H-index of 58 in Google Scholar. He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and Information Processing and Management, and the Americas Editor of Springer’s Information Retrieval Book Series. He is a conference program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004, NAACL HLT 2007, ACM SIGIR 2009, ECIR 2014, ICTIR 2015, and WWW 2015, and conference general co-chair for ACM CIKM 2016. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a recipient of multiple best paper awards, Rose Award for Teaching Excellence at UIUC, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, IBM Faculty Award, HP Innovation Research Program Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

UMBC’s undergraduate psychology program has been named the #3 up and coming program in the East in new rankings by BestPsychologyDegrees.com. The rankings considered the presence of graduate degree programs, innovative and cutting-edge methods and resources, recent facility updates, research opportunities, internships, and student organizations and societies.

The website’s editors recognized the psychology department’s strengths in providing a variety of courses and research opportunities to prepare students for successful careers:

The Psychology program at University of Maryland Baltimore County gives students an excellent foundation in psychology that can be applied in many careers as well as graduate studies. Psychology majors pick a concentration in areas such as Biopsychology and Human Services to gain more in-depth knowledge that can be applied to their desired career. The program’s peer mentor program produces successful students and community through review and group discussion sessions. Internships and research opportunities are available to give interested students a chance to apply their classroom studies to a professional setting. Doctoral students also have the opportunity to get hands-on experience at the UMBC Psychology Training Clinic.

Best Psychology Degrees aims to provide assistance to aspiring psychology professionals in finding degree programs that best meet the needs of each individual. Visit the rankings website to learn more about the ranking system.

Image: UMBC psychology class. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. 

The Washington Post has named UMBC alumna Shalonda Holt its 2016 Teacher of the Year. The recognition comes after Holt was named Howard County Teacher of the Year in February.

Holt ’07, biological sciences, teaching certificate in education, teaches biology at Centennial High School in Ellicott City, where she began her teaching career after graduating from UMBC.  A panel of experts, educators, and parents chose Holt out of 19 finalists from school systems in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. for The Washington Post Teacher of the Year honor.

A Post feature story published on April 7 describes Holt’s childhood, when she first developed a passion for education and learning: “She became a dedicated student inside the classroom and out, spending her weekend nights reading books while other kids looked for parties.” In describing her current teaching position, the article notes “her peers consider her a model educator and her students regard her as an ideal mentor.”

“Shalonda has such a powerful impact on her students and fellow teachers,” said HCPSS Superintendent Renee A. Foose in a Howard County Public School System press release announcing the recognition. “She is a dedicated educator who truly cares about her students and strives to improve the education experience. I am extremely proud of her and this accomplishment.”

In a Career Q&A on UMBC’s Alumni Blog, Holt discusses her innovative teaching methods and provides more background about why she decided to enter the education profession. Read more about her work in a Baltimore Sun article announcing her recognition as Howard County Teacher of the Year, and learn more about Holt in a Howard County Public School System “Staff Focus” video below.

Image: Shalonda Holt ’07, named 2016 Washington Post and Howard County Teacher of the Year. Photo by Nicholas Griner, Howard County Public School System. 

JOB SUMMARY:

In a new op-ed published in The Conversation, School of Public Policy Professor John Rennie Short comments on the growing infrastructure gap in the United States and questions why there isn’t more investment in public transportation in major cities.

Short’s op-ed “Why is the U.S. unwilling to pay for good public transportation” came after officials in Washington, D.C. closed the entire Metro system after frayed electrical cables were discovered in 26 locations.

“The quality of a country’s infrastructure is directly linked to its competitiveness because it makes businesses more productive and improves the quality of life. Why has the U.S. let its public transit slip so far?,” explains Short in his article.

Having just visited Switzerland, Short described how many European capitals have more advanced public transportation systems, stating that “our competitors are out-investing us in the vital infrastructure necessary to make our economy efficient and internationally competitive.”

Further analyzing what has contributed to growing public transport issues, Short mentions increased use of cars, investment in the national highway system, and constrained funding for transportation improvements, among other issues, but writes “there is some room for optimism.”

Read the full article in The Conversation. The op-ed has been circulated widely and has been picked up by Slate and Sea Change Radio. Professor Short also wrote a similar article on April 13 for Market Watch titled “Our crumbling infrastructure is hurting U.S. competitiveness.”   

Image: John Rennie Short. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.