This paper aims at discussing past limitations set in sentiment analysis research regarding explicit and implicit mentions of opinions. Previous studies have regularly neglected this question in favor of methodical research on standard-datasets. Furthermore, they were limited to linguistically less-diverse domains, such as commercial product reviews. We face this issue by annotating a German-language physician review dataset that contains numerous implicit, long, and complex statements that indicate aspect ratings, such as the physician’s friendliness. We discuss the nature of implicit statements and present various samples to illustrate the challenge described.

Content is the new oil. Users consume billions of terabytes a day while surfing on news sites or blogs, posting on social media sites, and sending chat messages around the globe. While content is heterogeneous, the dominant form of web content is text. There are situations where more diversity needs to be introduced into text content, for example, to reuse it on websites or to allow a chatbot to base its models on the information conveyed rather than of the language used. In order to achieve this, paraphrasing techniques have been developed: One example is Text spinning, a technique that automatically paraphrases text while leaving the intent intact. This makes it easier to reuse content, or to change the language generated by the bot more human. One method for modifying texts is a combination of translation and back-translation. This paper presents NATTS, a naive approach that uses transformer-based translation models to create diversified text, combining translation steps in one model. An advantage of this approach is that it can be fine-tuned and handle technical language.

This paper deals with aspect phrase extraction and classification in sentiment analysis. We summarize current approaches and datasets from the domain of aspect-based sentiment analysis. This domain detects sentiments expressed for individual aspects in unstructured text data. So far, mainly commercial user reviews for products or services such as restaurants were investigated. We here present our dataset consisting of German physician reviews, a sensitive and linguistically complex field. Furthermore, we describe the annotation process of a dataset for supervised learning with neural networks. Moreover, we introduce our model for extracting and classifying aspect phrases in one step, which obtains an F1-score of 80%. By applying it to a more complex domain, our approach and results outperform previous approaches.

When it comes to increased digitization in the health care domain, privacy is a relevant topic nowadays. This relates to patient data, electronic health records or physician reviews published online, for instance. There exist different approaches to the protection of individuals’ privacy, which focus on the anonymization and masking of personal information subsequent to their mining. In the medical domain in particular, measures to protect the privacy of patients are of high importance due to the amount of sensitive data that is involved (e.g. age, gender, illnesses, medication). While privacy breaches in structured data can be detected more easily, disclosure in written texts is more difficult to find automatically due to the unstructured nature of natural language. Therefore, we take a detailed look at existing research on areas related to privacy protection. Likewise, we review approaches to the automatic detection of privacy disclosure in different types of medical data. We provide a survey of several studies concerned with privacy breaches in the medical domain with a focus on Physician Review Websites (PRWs). Finally, we briefly develop implications and directions for further research.

This paper deals with online customer reviews of local multi-service providers. While many studies investigate product reviews and online labour markets with service providers delivering intangible products “over the wire”, we focus on websites where providers offer multiple distinct services that can be booked, paid and reviewed online but are performed locally offline. This type of service providers has so far been neglected in the literature. This paper analyses reviews and applies sentiment analysis. It aims to gain new insights into local multi-service providers’ performance. There is a broad literature range presented with regard to the topics addressed. The results show, among other things, that providers with good ratings continue to perform well over time. We find that many positive reviews seem to encourage sales. On average, quantitative star ratings and qualitative ratings in the form of review texts match. Further results are also achieved in this study.

The ability to openly evaluate products, locations and services is an achievement of the Web 2.0. It has never been easier to inform oneself about the quality of products or services and possible alternatives. Forming one’s own opinion based on the impressions of other people can lead to better experiences. However, this presupposes trust in one’s fellows as well as in the quality of the review platforms. In previous work on physician reviews and the corresponding websites, it was observed that there occurs faulty behavior by some reviewers and there were noteworthy differences in the technical implementation of the portals and in the efforts of site operators to maintain high quality reviews. These experiences raise new questions regarding what trust means on review platforms, how trust arises and how easily it can be destroyed.

Physician Review Websites allow users to evaluate their experiences with health services. As these evaluations are regularly contextualized with facts from users’ private lives, they often accidentally disclose personal information on the Web. This poses a serious threat to users’ privacy. In this paper, we report on early work in progress on “Text Broom”, a tool to detect privacy breaches in user-generated texts. For this purpose, we conceptualize a pipeline which combines methods of Natural Language Processing such as Named Entity Recognition, linguistic patterns and domain-specific Machine Learning approaches which have the potential to recognize privacy violations with wide coverage. A prototypical web application is openly accesible.

In this paper, we present an IoT architecture which handles stream sensor data of air pollution. Particle pollution is known as a serious threat to human health. Along with developments in the use of wireless sensors and the IoT, we propose an architecture that flexibly measures and processes stream data collected in real-time by movable and low-cost IoT sensors. Thus, it enables a wide-spread network of wireless sensors that can follow changes in human behavior. Apart from stating reasons for the need of such a development and its requirements, we provide a conceptual design as well as a technological design of such an architecture. The technological design consists of Kaa and Apache Storm which can collect air pollution information in real-time and solve various problems to process data such as missing data and synchronization. This enables us to add a simulation in which we provide issues that might come up when having our architecture in use. Together with these issues, we state r easons for choosing specific modules among candidates. Our architecture combines wireless sensors with the Kaa IoT framework, an Apache Kafka pipeline and an Apache Storm Data Stream Management System among others. We even provide open-government data sets that are freely available.