tomorrow, 2pm: master defense Hella Haanstra

[Zuidema, Jelle]

Dear all,

Tomorrow (Monday October 1st) at 2pm, Hella Haanstra will defend her Master AI thesis:
"Opinion aspect extraction in Dutch children’s diary entries" (abstract below).

You're welcome to attend the public defense in room 1.15, SP107.

Best
Jelle

***

Aspect extraction can be used in dialogue systems to understand the topic of opin-
ionated text. Expressing an empathetic reaction to an opinion can strengthen the
bond between a human and, for example, a robot. The aims of this study were three-
fold: to create a new annotated dataset for both aspect extraction and opinion words
for Dutch children’s language, to acquire aspect extraction results for this task and
to improve current results for aspect extraction in Dutch reviews. This was done by
training a deep learning Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model, originally developed
for an English review dataset, on Dutch restaurant review data to classify both opin-
ion words and their respective aspects. We obtained state-of-the-art performance on
the Dutch restaurant review dataset. Additionally, we acquired aspect extraction re-
sults for the Dutch children’s dataset. Since the model was trained on standardised
language, these results are quite promising.