Exploring the interaction between humans and computers via natural language

09 October 2013

Researchers from IMDEA Networks, together with Factory Holding Company 25 (FHC25), have achieved 3^rd place in a contest held at TASS 2013, an experimental evaluation workshop for sentiment analysis and online reputation analysis focused on Spanish language, organized as a satellite event of the annual SEPLN Conference.

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The team competed on one of four proposed tasks, challenging research groups to experiment and find the best possible technological solutions on different aspects of sentiment analysis and automatic text classification. Task 2: Topic classification, requested them to build a classifier to automatically identify the topic of each message in a test set of thousands of tweet messages.

This is a remarkable achievement for the IMDEA Networks participants, as they are relatively novel to natural language processing (NLP), having only started work on this area in the summer of 2012. TASS 2013 was held on September 20th, 2013, in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. NLP is a scientific field dedicated to explore the interaction between humans and computers via natural language. It is acquiring increasing importance in the current trend to analyze the vast communication data available on social networks due to its enormous potential to provide clues for the understanding of social forces and human interplay.

The IMDEA Networks group members were Antonio Fernández Anta, Agustín Santos, Luis Felipe Núñez, and Héctor Córdobés. The members from FHC25 were Fernando Pérez and Teófilo Redondo.

IMDEA Networks and FHC25 have collaborated in the research project SOCAM (Sistema Operativo de Código Abierto Multi-dispositivo – Multi-device Open Source Operating System), which concluded at the end of September.