With the tremendous increase in the use of social network sites like Twitter and Facebook, online community is exchanging information in the form of opinions, sentiments, emotions, and intentions, which reflect their affiliations and aptitude towards an entity, event and policy [1-3]. The propagation of extremist content has also been increasing and being considered as a serious issue in the recent era due to the rise of militant groups such as Irish Republican Army, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Al Quaeda, ISIS (Daesh), Al Shabaab, Taliban, Hezbollah and others [4]. These groups have spread their roots not only at the community levels but also their networks are gaining control of social networking sites [5]. These networking sites are vulnerable and approachable platforms for the group strengthening, propaganda, brainwashing, and fundraising due to its massive impact on public sentiments and opinions. Opinions expressed on such sites give an important clue about the activities and behavior of online users. Detection of such extremist content is important to analyze user sentiment towards some extremist group and to discourage such associated unlawful acts. It is also beneficial in terms of classifying user's extremist affiliation by filtering tweets prior to their onward transmission, recommendation or training AI Chatbot from tweets [6].

With the rapid increase in social networks and blogs, the social media services are increasingly being used by online communities to share their views and experiences about a particular product, policy and event. Due to economic importance of these reviews, there is growing trend of writing user reviews to promote a product. Nowadays, users prefer online blogs and review sites to purchase products. Therefore, user reviews are considered as an important source of information in Sentiment Analysis (SA) applications for decision making. In this work, we exploit the wealth of user reviews, available through the online forums, to analyze the semantic orientation of words by categorizing them into +ive and -ive classes to identify and classify emoticons, modifiers, general-purpose and domain-specific words expressed in the public’s feedback about the products. However, the un-supervised learning approach employed in previous studies is becoming less efficient due to data sparseness, low accuracy due to non-consideration of emoticons, modifiers, and presence of domain specific words, as they may result in inaccurate classification of users’ reviews. Lexicon-enhanced sentiment analysis based on Rule-based classification scheme is an alternative approach for improving sentiment classification of users’ reviews in online communities. In addition to the sentiment terms used in general purpose sentiment analysis, we integrate emoticons, modifiers and domain specific terms to analyze the reviews posted in online communities. To test the effectiveness of the proposed method, we considered users reviews in three domains. The results obtained from different experiments demonstrate that the proposed method overcomes limitations of previous methods and the performance of the sentiment analysis is improved after considering emoticons, modifiers, negations, and domain specific terms when compared to baseline methods.

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Of the many social media sites available, users prefer microblogging services such as Twitter to learn about product services, social events, and political trends. Twitter is considered an important source of information in sentiment analysis applications. Supervised and unsupervised machine learning‐based techniques for Twitter data analysis have been investigated in the last few years, often resulting in an incorrect classification of sentiments. In this paper, we focus on these issues and present a unified framework for classifying tweets using a hybrid classification scheme. The proposed method aims at improving the performance of Twitter‐based sentiment analysis systems by incorporating 4 classifiers: (a) a slang classifier, (b) an emoticon classifier, (c) the SentiWordNet classifier, and (d) an improved domain‐specific classifier. After applying the preprocessing steps, the input text is passed through the emoticon and slang classifiers. In the next stage, SentiWordNet‐based and domain‐specific classifiers are applied to classify the text more accurately. Finally, sentiment classification is performed at sentence and document levels. The findings revealed that the proposed method overcomes the limitations of previous methods by considering slang, emoticons, and domain‐specific terms.

The exponential increase in the health-related online reviews has played a pivotal role in the development of sentiment analysis systems for extracting and analyzing user-generated health reviews about a drug or medication. The existing general purpose opinion lexicons, such as SentiWordNet has a limited coverage of health-related terms, creating problems for the development of health-based sentiment analysis applications. In this work, we present a hybrid approach to create health-related domain specific lexicon for the efficient classification and scoring of health-related users’ sentiments. The proposed approach is based on the bootstrapping modal, a dataset of health reviews, and corpus-based sentiment detection and scoring. In each of the iteration, vocabulary of the lexicon is updated automatically from an initial seed cache, irrelevant words are filtered, words are declared as medical or non-medical entries, and finally sentiment class and score is assigned to each of the word. The results obtained demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique.

The first part of this research is comprised of an experimental study to investigate the comparative usefulness of the Grammar Translation Method and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach in teaching English at the intermediate level. A pre-test, post-test group design was used to measure achievement and attitude of the students. The second part of this research is comprised of a survey study to investigate the Pakistani teachers' perception of the CLT approach and their perceived impediments in its application at the higher secondary level. A semi-structured questionnaire was used for this purpose, and ten teachers were interviewed.

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The exponential increase in the explosion of Web-based user generated reviews has resulted in the emergence of Opinion Mining (OM) applications for analyzing the users’ opinions toward products, services, and policies. The polarity lexicons often play a pivotal role in the OM, indicating the positivity and negativity of a term along with the numeric score. However, the commonly available domain independent lexicons are not an optimal choice for all of the domains within the OM applications. The aforementioned is due to the fact that the polarity of a term changes from one domain to other and such lexicons do not contain the correct polarity of a term for every domain. In this work, we focus on the problem of adapting a domain dependent polarity lexicon from set of labeled user reviews and domain independent lexicon to propose a unified learning framework based on the information theory concepts that can assign the terms with correct polarity (+ive, -ive) scores. The benchmarking on three datasets (car, hotel, and drug reviews) shows that our approach improves the performance of the polarity classification by achieving higher accuracy. Moreover, using the derived domain dependent lexicon changed the polarity of terms, and the experimental results show that our approach is more effective than the base line methods.