French Social Media Mining: Expertise and Sentiment

Social Media has changed the way we communicate between individuals, within organizations and communities. The availability of these social data opens new opportunities to understand and influence the user behavior. Therefore, Social Media Mining is experiencing a growing interest in various scientific and economic circles. In this thesis, we are specifically interested in the users of these networks whom we try to characterize in two ways: (i) their expertise and their reputations and (ii) the sentiments they express. Conventionally, social data is often mined according to its network structure. However, the textual content of the exchanged messages may reveal additional knowledge that can not be known through the analysis of the structure. Until recently, the majority of work done for the analysis of the textual content was proposed for English. The originality of this thesis is to develop methods and resources based on the textual content of the messages for French Social Media Mining. In the first axis, we initially suggest to predict the user expertise. For this, we used forums that recruit health experts to learn classification models that serve to identify messages posted by experts in any other health forum. We demonstrate that models learned on appropriate forums can be used effectively on other forums. Then, in a second step, we focus on the user reputation in these forums. The idea is to seek expressions of trust and distrust expressed in the textual content of the exchanged messages, to search the recipients of these messages and use this information to deduce users’ reputation. We propose a new reputation measure that weighs the score of each response by the reputation of its author. Automatic and manual evaluations have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In the second axis, we focus on the extraction of sentiments (emotions and polarity). For this, we started by building a French lexicon of sentiments and emotions that we call FEEL (French Expanded Emotions Lexicon). This lexicon is built semiautomatically by translating and expanding its English counterpart NRC EmoLex. We then compare FEEL with existing French lexicons from literature on reference benchmarks. The results show that FEEL improves the classification of French texts according to their polarities and emotions. Finally, we propose to evaluate different features, methods and resources for the classification of sentiments in French. The conducted experiments have identified useful features and methods in the classification of sentiments for different types of texts. The learned systems have been particularly efficient on reference benchmarks.