This paper focuses mainly on the problem of Chinese medical question answer matching, which is arguably more challenging than open-domain question answer matching in English due to the combination of its domain-restricted nature and the language-specific features of Chinese. We present an end-to-end character-level multi-scale convolutional neural framework in which character embeddings instead of word embeddings are used to avoid Chinese word segmentation in text preprocessing, and multi-scale convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are then introduced to extract contextual information from either question or answer sentences over different scales. The proposed framework can be trained with minimal human supervision and does not require any handcrafted features, rule-based patterns, or external resources. To validate our framework, we create a new text corpus, named cMedQA, by harvesting questions and answers from an online Chinese health and wellness community. The experimental results on the cMedQA dataset show that our framework significantly outperforms several strong baselines, and achieves an improvement of top-1 accuracy by up to 19%.

With the booming of social media, sentiment analysis has developed rapidly in recent years. However, only a few studies focused on the field of transportation, which failed to meet the stringent requirements of safety, efficiency, and information exchange of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). We propose the traffic sentiment analysis (TSA) as a new tool to tackle this problem, which provides a new prospective for modern ITSs. Methods and models in TSA are proposed in this paper, and the advantages and disadvantages of rule- and learning-based approaches are analyzed based on web data. Practically, we applied the rule-based approach to deal with real problems, presented an architectural design, constructed related bases, demonstrated the process, and discussed the online data collection. Two cases were studied to demonstrate the efficiency of our method: the “yellow light rule” and “fuel price” in China. Our work will help the development of TSA and its applications.

Proactive handling of social unrest events which are common happenings in both democracies and authoritarian regimes requires that the risk of upcoming social unrest event is continuously assessed. Most existing approaches comparatively pay little attention to considering the event development stages. In this paper, we use autocoded events dataset GDELT (Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone) to build a Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) based framework to predict indicators associated with country instability. The framework utilizes the temporal burst patterns in GDELT event streams to uncover the underlying event development mechanics and formulates the social unrest event prediction as a sequence classification problem based on Bayes decision. Extensive experiments with data from five countries in Southeast Asia demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework, which outperforms the logistic regression method by 7% to 27% and the baseline method 34% to 62% for various countries.

Networked systems that occur in various domains, such as electric networks, the brain, and opinion networks, are known to obey conservation laws. For instance, electric networks obey Kirchoff’s laws, and social networks obey opinion consensus. Conservation laws are often modeled as balance equations that relate appropriate injected flows and potentials at the nodes of the networks. A recent line of work considers the problem of estimating the unknown structure of such networked systems from observations of node potentials (and only the knowledge of the statistics of injected flows). Given the dynamic nature of the systems under consideration, an equally important task is estimating the change in the structure of the network from data – the so called differential network analysis problem. That is, given two sets of node potential observations, the goal is to estimate the structural differences between the underlying networks. We formulate this novel differential network analysis problem for systems obeying conservation laws and devise a convex estimator to learn the edge changes directly from node potentials. We derive conditions under which the estimate is unique in the highdimensional regime and devise an efficient ADMM-based approach to perform the estimation. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our approach on synthetic and benchmark power network data.