Sergio Ortiz-Rojas

Marta Bañón, Jaume Zaragoza-Bernabeu, Gema Ramírez-Sánchez et al.

Language identification is a crucial component in the automated production of language resources, particularly in multilingual and big data contexts. However, commonly used language identifiers struggle to differentiate between similar or closely-related languages. This paper introduces FastSpell, a language identifier that combines fastText (a pre-trained language identifier tool) and Hunspell (a spell checker) with the aim of having a refined second-opinion before deciding which language should be assigned to a text. We provide a description of the FastSpell algorithm along with an explanation on how to use and configure it. To that end, we motivate the need of such a tool and present a benchmark including some popular language identifiers evaluated during the development of FastSpell. We show how FastSpell is useful not only to improve identification of similar languages, but also to identify new ones ignored by other tools.

Boyan Bonev, Gema Ramírez-Sánchez, Sergio Ortiz Rojas

The classification of opinion texts in positive and negative is becoming a subject of great interest in sentiment analysis. The existence of many labeled opinions motivates the use of statistical and machine-learning methods. First-order statistics have proven to be very limited in this field. The Opinum approach is based on the order of the words without using any syntactic and semantic information. It consists of building one probabilistic model for the positive and another one for the negative opinions. Then the test opinions are compared to both models and a decision and confidence measure are calculated. In order to reduce the complexity of the training corpus we first lemmatize the texts and we replace most named-entities with wildcards. Opinum presents an accuracy above 81% for Spanish opinions in the financial products domain. In this work we discuss which are the most important factors that have impact on the classification performance.