In recent years, the use of social networks has increased exponentially, which has led to a significant increase in cyberbullying. Currently, in the field of Computer Science, research has been made on how to detect aggressiveness in texts, which is a prelude to detecting cyberbullying. In this field, the main work has been done for English language texts, mainly using Machine Learning (ML) approaches, Lexicon approaches to a lesser extent, and very few works using hybrid approaches. In these, Lexicons and Machine Learning algorithms are used, such as counting the number of bad words in a sentence using a Lexicon of bad words, which serves as an input feature for classification algorithms. This research aims at contributing towards detecting aggressiveness in Spanish language texts by creating different models that combine the Lexicons and ML approach. Twenty-two models that combine techniques and algorithms from both approaches are proposed, and for their application, certain hyperparameters are adjusted in the training datasets of the corpora, to obtain the best results in the test datasets. Three Spanish language corpora are used in the evaluation: Chilean, Mexican, and Chilean-Mexican corpora. The results indicate that hybrid models obtain the best results in the 3 corpora, over implemented models that do not use Lexicons. This shows that by mixing approaches, aggressiveness detection improves. Finally, a web application is developed that gives applicability to each model by classifying tweets, allowing evaluating the performance of models with external corpus and receiving feedback on the prediction of each one for future research. In addition, an API is available that can be integrated into technological tools for parental control, online plugins for writing analysis in social networks, and educational tools, among others.

Purpose: This paper aims to propose a method for automatically labelling an affective lexicon with intensity values by using the WordNet Similarity (WS) software package with the purpose of improving the results of an affective analysis process, which is relevant to interpreting the textual information that is available in social networks. The hypothesis states that it is possible to improve affective analysis by using a lexicon that is enriched with the intensity values obtained from similarity metrics. Encouraging results were obtained when an affective analysis based on a labelled lexicon was compared with that based on another lexicon without intensity values. Design/methodology/approach: The authors propose a method for the automatic extraction of the affective intensity values of words using the similarity metrics implemented in WS. First, the intensity values were calculated for words having an affective root in WordNet. Then, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposal, the results of the affective analysis based on a labelled lexicon were compared to the results of an analysis with and without affective intensity values. Findings: The main contribution of this research is a method for the automatic extraction of the intensity values of affective words used to enrich a lexicon compared with the manual labelling process. The results obtained from the affective analysis with the new lexicon are encouraging, as they provide a better performance than those achieved using a lexicon without affective intensity values. Research limitations/implications: Given the restrictions for calculating the similarity between two words, the lexicon labelled with intensity values is a subset of the original lexicon, which means that a large proportion of the words in the corpus are not labelled in the new lexicon. Practical implications: The practical implications of this work include providing tools to improve the analysis of the feelings of the users of social networks. In particular, it is of interest to provide an affective lexicon that improves attempts to solve the problems of a digital society, such as the detection of cyberbullying. In this case, by achieving greater precision in the detection of emotions, it is possible to detect the roles of participants in a situation of cyberbullying, for example, the bully and victim. Other problems in which the application of affective lexicons is of importance are the detection of aggressiveness against women or gender violence or the detection of depressive states in young people and children. Social implications: This work is interested in providing an affective lexicon that improves attempts to solve the problems of a digital society, such as the detection of cyberbullying. In this case, by achieving greater precision in the detection of emotions, it is possible to detect the roles of participants in a situation of cyber bullying, for example, the bully and victim. Other problems in which the application of affective lexicons is of importance are the detection of aggressiveness against women or gender violence or the detection of depressive states in young people and children. Originality/value: The originality of the research lies in the proposed method for automatically labelling the words of an affective lexicon with intensity values by using WS. To date, a lexicon labelled with intensity values has been constructed using the opinions of experts, but that method is more expensive and requires more time than other existing methods. On the other hand, the new method developed herein is applicable to larger lexicons, requires less time and facilitates automatic updating.

Hopfield Neural Networks (HNNs) are recurrent neural networks used to implement associative memory. They can be applied to pattern recognition, optimization, or image segmentation. However, sometimes it is not easy to provide the users with good explanations about the results obtained with them due to mainly the large number of changes in the state of neurons (and their weights) produced during a problem of machine learning. There are currently limited techniques to visualize, verbalize, or abstract HNNs. This paper outlines how we can construct automatic video-generation systems to explain its execution. This work constitutes a novel approach to obtain explainable artificial intelligence systems in general and HNNs in particular building on the theory of data-to-text systems and software visualization approaches. We present a complete methodology to build these kinds of systems. Software architecture is also designed, implemented, and tested. Technical details about the implementation are also detailed and explained. We apply our approach to creating a complete explainer video about the execution of HNNs on a small recognition problem. Finally, several aspects of the videos generated are evaluated (quality, content, motivation and design/presentation).

Over the last ten years, social media has become a crucial data source for businesses and researchers, providing a space where people can express their opinions and emotions. To analyze this data and classify emotions and their polarity in texts, natural language processing (NLP) techniques such as emotion analysis (EA) and sentiment analysis (SA) are employed. However, the effectiveness of these tasks using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods depends on large labeled datasets, which are scarce in languages like Spanish. To address this challenge, researchers use data augmentation (DA) techniques to artificially expand small datasets. This study aims to investigate whether DA techniques can improve classification results using ML and DL algorithms for sentiment and emotion analysis of Spanish texts. Various text manipulation techniques were applied, including transformations, paraphrasing (back-translation), and text generation using generative adversarial networks, to small datasets such as song lyrics, social media comments, headlines from national newspapers in Chile, and survey responses from higher education students. The findings show that the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier achieved the most significant improvement, with an 18% increase using the Generative Adversarial Networks for Sentiment Text (SentiGan) on the Aggressiveness (Seriousness) dataset. Additionally, the same classifier model showed an 11% improvement using the Easy Data Augmentation (EDA) on the Gender-Based Violence dataset. The performance of the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BETO) also improved by 10% on the back-translation augmented version of the October 18 dataset, and by 4% on the EDA augmented version of the Teaching survey dataset. These results suggest that data augmentation techniques enhance performance by transforming text and adapting it to the specific characteristics of the dataset. Through experimentation with various augmentation techniques, this research provides valuable insights into the analysis of subjectivity in Spanish texts and offers guidance for selecting algorithms and techniques based on dataset features.