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Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the computerized approach to analyzing text using both structured and unstructured data. NLP is a simple, empirically powerful, and reliable approach. It achieves state-of-the-art performance in language processing tasks like Semantic Search (SS), Machine Translation (MT), Text Summarization (TS), Sentiment Analyzer (SA), Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Emotion Detection (ED). NLP is expected to be the technology of the future, based on current technology deployment and adoption. The primary question is: What does NLP have to offer in terms of reality, and what are the prospects? There are several problems to be addressed with this developing method, as it must be compatible with future technology. In this paper, the benefits, challenges and limitations of this innovative paradigm along with the areas open to do research are shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eliciting informative user opinions from online reviews is a key success factor for innovative product design and development. The unstructured, noisy, and verbose nature of user reviews, however, often complicate large-scale need finding in a format useful for designers without losing important information. Recent advances in abstractive text summarization have created the opportunity to systematically generate opinion summaries from online reviews to inform the early stages of product design and development. However, two knowledge gaps hinder the applicability of opinion summarization methods in practice. First, there is a lack of formal mechanisms to guide the generative process with respect to different categories of product attributes and user sentiments. Second, the annotated training datasets needed for supervised training of abstractive summarization models are often difficult and costly to create. This article addresses these gaps by (1) devising an efficient computational framework for abstractive opinion summarization guided by specific product attributes and sentiment polarities, and (2) automatically generating a synthetic training dataset that captures various degrees of granularity and polarity. A hierarchical multi-instance attribute-sentiment inference model is developed for assembling a high-quality synthetic dataset, which is utilized to fine-tune a pretrained language model for abstractive summary generation. Numerical experiments conducted on a large dataset scraped from three major e-Commerce retail stores for apparel and footwear products indicate the performance, feasibility, and potentials of the developed framework. Several directions are provided for future exploration in the area of automated opinion summarization for user-centered design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, the techniques of news aggregation and summarization have been increasingly gaining relevance for providing users on the web with condensed and unbiased information. Indeed, the recent development of successful machine learning algorithms, such as those based on the transformers architecture, have made it possible to create effective tools for capturing and elaborating news from the Internet. In this regard, this work proposes, for the first time in the literature to the best of the authors' knowledge, a methodology for the application of such techniques in news related to cryptocurrencies and the blockchain, whose quick reading can be deemed as extremely useful to operators in the financial sector. Specifically, cutting-edge solutions in the field of natural language processing were employed to cluster news by topic and summarize the corresponding articles published by different newspapers. The results achieved on 22,282 news articles show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in most of the cases, with 86.8 % of the examined summaries being considered as coherent and 95.7 % of the corresponding articles correctly aggregated. This methodology was implemented in a freely accessible web application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precision education is a new challenge in leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, and learning analytics to enhance teaching quality and learning performance. To facilitate precision education, text marking skills can be used to determine students' learning process. Text marking is an essential learning skill in reading. In this study, we proposed a model that leverages the state-of-the-art text summarization technique, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), to calculate the marking score for 130 graduate students enrolled in an accounting course. Then, we applied learning analytics to analyze the correlation between their marking scores and learning performance. We measured students' self-regulated learning (SRL) and clustered them into four groups based on their marking scores and marking frequencies to examine whether differences in reading skills and text marking influence students' learning performance and awareness of self-regulation. Consistent with past research, our results did not indicate a strong relationship between marking scores and learning performance. However, high-skill readers who use more marking strategies perform better in learning performance, task strategies, and time management than high-skill readers who use fewer marking strategies. Furthermore, high-skill readers who actively employ marking strategies also achieve superior scores of environment structure, and task strategies in SRL than low-skill readers who are inactive in marking. The findings of this research provide evidence supporting the importance of monitoring and training students' text marking skill and facilitating precision education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generative Summarization is of great importance in understanding large-scale textual data. In this work, we propose an attention-based Tree-LSTM model for sentence summarization, which utilizes an attention-based syntactic structure as auxiliary information. Thereinto, block-alignment is used to align the input and output syntax blocks, while inter-alignment is used for alignment of words within that of block pairs. To some extent, block-alignment can prevent structural deviations on the long sentences and inter-alignment is capable of increasing the flexibility of the generation in the blocks. This model can be easily trained to end-to-end mode and deal with any length of the input sentences. Compared with several relatively strong baselines, our model has achieved the state-of-art on DUC-2004 shared task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]