Current language processing technologies allow the creation of conversational chatbot platforms. Even though artificial intelligence is still too immature to support satisfactory user experience in many mass market domains, conversational interfaces have found their way into ad hoc applications such as call centres and online shopping assistants. However, they have not been applied so far to social inclusion of elderly people, who are particularly vulnerable to the digital divide. Many of them relieve their loneliness with traditional media such as TV and radio, which are known to create a feeling of companionship. In this paper we present the EBER chatbot, designed to reduce the digital gap for the elderly. EBER reads news in the background and adapts its responses to the user's mood. Its novelty lies in the concept of “intelligent radio”, according to which, instead of simplifying a digital information system to make it accessible to the elderly, a traditional channel they find familiar -background news- is augmented with interactions via voice dialogues. We make it possible by combining Artificial Intelligence Modelling Language, automatic Natural Language Generation and Sentiment Analysis. The system allows accessing digital content of interest by combining words extracted from user answers to chatbot questions with keywords extracted from the news items. This approach permits defining metrics of the abstraction capabilities of the users depending on a spatial representation of the word space. To prove the suitability of the proposed solution we present results of real experiments conducted with elderly people that provided valuable insights. Our approach was considered satisfactory during the tests and improved the information search capabilities of the participants.

Transformer architectures contribute to managing long-term dependencies for natural language processing, representing one of the most recent changes in the field. These architectures are the basis of the innovative, cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) that have produced a huge buzz in several fields and industrial sectors, among the ones education stands out. Accordingly, these generative artificial intelligence-based solutions have directed the change in techniques and the evolution in educational methods and contents, along with network infrastructure, towards high-quality learning. Given the popularity of LLMs, this review seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of those solutions designed specifically to generate and evaluate educational materials and which involve students and teachers in their design or experimental plan. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review of educational applications (e.g., student assessment) of LLMs. As expected, the most common role of these systems is as virtual tutors for automatic question generation. Moreover, the most popular models are GPT-3 and BERT. However, due to the continuous launch of new generative models, new works are expected to be published shortly.

Previous researchers have proposed intelligent systems for therapeutic monitoring of cognitive impairments. However, most existing practical approaches for this purpose are based on manual tests. This raises issues such as excessive caretaking effort and the white-coat effect. To avoid these issues, we present an intelligent conversational system for entertaining elderly people with news of their interest that monitors cognitive impairment transparently. Automatic chatbot dialogue stages allow assessing content description skills and detecting cognitive impairment with Machine Learning algorithms. We create these dialogue flows automatically from updated news items using Natural Language Generation techniques. The system also infers the gold standard of the answers to the questions, so it can assess cognitive capabilities automatically by comparing these answers with the user responses. It employs a similarity metric with values in [0, 1], in increasing level of similarity. To evaluate the performance and usability of our approach, we have conducted field tests with a test group of 30 elderly people in the earliest stages of dementia, under the supervision of gerontologists. In the experiments, we have analysed the effect of stress and concentration in these users. Those without cognitive impairment performed up to five times better. In particular, the similarity metric varied between 0.03, for stressed and unfocused participants, and 0.36, for relaxed and focused users. Finally, we developed a Machine Learning algorithm based on textual analysis features for automatic cognitive impairment detection, which attained accuracy, F-measure and recall levels above 80%. We have thus validated the automatic approach to detect cognitive impairment in elderly people based on entertainment content. The results suggest that the solution has strong potential for long-term user-friendly therapeutic monitoring of elderly people.

Short texts are omnipresent in real-time news, social network commentaries, etc. Traditional text representation methods have been successfully applied to self-contained documents of medium size. However, information in short texts is often insufficient, due, for example, to the use of mnemonics, which makes them hard to classify. Therefore, the particularities of specific domains must be exploited. In this article we describe a novel system that combines Natural Language Processing techniques with Machine Learning algorithms to classify banking transaction descriptions for personal finance management, a problem that was not previously considered in the literature. We trained and tested that system on a labelled dataset with real customer transactions that will be available to other researchers on request. Motivated by existing solutions in spam detection, we also propose a short text similarity detector to reduce training set size based on the Jaccard distance. Experimental results with a two-stage classifier combining this detector with a SVM indicate a high accuracy in comparison with alternative approaches, taking into account complexity and computing time. Finally, we present a use case with a personal finance application, CoinScrap, which is available at Google Play and App Store.

Financial news items are unstructured sources of information that can be mined to extract knowledge for market screening applications. They are typically written by market experts who describe stock market events within the context of social, economic and political change. Manual extraction of relevant information from the continuous stream of finance-related news is cumbersome and beyond the skills of many investors, who, at most, can follow a few sources and authors. Accordingly, we focus on the analysis of financial news to identify relevant text and, within that text, forecasts and predictions. We propose a novel Natural Language Processing (nlp) system to assist investors in the detection of relevant financial events in unstructured textual sources by considering both relevance and temporality at the discursive level. Firstly, we segment the text to group together closely related text. Secondly, we apply co-reference resolution to discover internal dependencies within segments. Finally, we perform relevant topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (lda) to separate relevant from less relevant text and then analyse the relevant text using a Machine Learning-oriented temporal approach to identify predictions and speculative statements. Our solution outperformed a rule-based baseline system. We created an experimental data set composed of 2,158 financial news items that were manually labelled by nlp researchers to evaluate our solution. Inter-agreement Alpha-reliability and accuracy values, and rouge-l results endorse its potential as a valuable tool for busy investors. The rouge-l values for the identification of relevant text and predictions/forecasts were 0.662 and 0.982, respectively. To our knowledge, this is the first work to jointly consider relevance and temporality at the discursive level. It contributes to the transfer of human associative discourse capabilities to expert systems through the combination of multi-paragraph topic segmentation and co-reference resolution to separate author expression patterns, topic modelling with lda to detect relevant text, and discursive temporality analysis to identify forecasts and predictions within this text. Our solution may have compelling applications in the financial field, including the possibility of extracting relevant statements on investment strategies to analyse authors’ reputations.