We analyze a case study in the field of smart agriculture exploiting Explainable AI (XAI) approach, a field of study that aims to provide interpretations and explanations to the behaviour of AI systems. The study regards a multiclass classification problem on the Crop Recommendation dataset. The original task is the prediction of the most adequate crop, according to seven features. In addition to the predictions, two of the most well-known XAI approaches have been used in order to obtain explanations and interpretations of the behaviour of the models: SHAP (SHapley Additive ExPlanations), and LIME (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations). Both packages provide easy-to-understand visualizations that allow common users to understand explanations of single predictions even without going into the mathematical details of the algorithms. Within the scientific community criticisms have been raised against these approaches, and recently some papers brought to light some weaknesses. However, the two algorithms are among the most popular in XAI and are still considered points of reference for this field of study.

A conversational agent, capable to have a ldquosense of humourrdquo is presented. The agent can both generate humorous sentences and recognize humoristic expressions introduced by the user during the dialogue. Humorist Bot makes use of well founded techniques of computational humor and it has been implemented using the ALICE framework embedded into an Yahoo! Messenger client. It includes also an avatar that changes the face expression according to humoristic content of the dialogue.

The aim of this paper is to present a new point of view that makes it possible to give a statistical interpretation of the traditional latent semantic analysis (LSA) paradigm based on the truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD) technique. We show how the TSVD can be interpreted as a statistical estimator derived from the LSA co-occurrence relationship matrix by mapping probability distributions on Riemanian manifolds. Besides, the quality of the estimator model can be expressed by introducing a figure of merit arising from the Solomonoff approach. This figure of merit takes into account both the adherence to the sample data and the simplicity of the model. In our model, the simplicity parameter of the proposed figure of merit depends on the number of the singular values retained after the truncation process, while the TSVD estimator, according to the Hellinger distance, guarantees the minimal distance between the sample probability distribution and the inferred probabilistic model.

Purpose: An ever-growing body of knowledge demonstrates the correlation among real-world phenomena and search query data issued on Google, as showed in the literature survey introduced in the following. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a pipeline, implemented as a web service, which, starting with recent Google Trends, allows a decision maker to monitor Twitter’s sentiment regarding these trends, enabling users to choose geographic areas for their monitors. In addition to the positive/negative sentiments about Google Trends, the pipeline offers the ability to view, on the same dashboard, the emotions that Google Trends triggers in the Twitter population. Such a set of tools, allows, as a whole, monitoring real-time on Twitter the feelings about Google Trends that would otherwise only fall into search statistics, even if useful. As a whole, the pipeline has no claim of prediction over the trends it tracks. Instead, it aims to provide a user with guidance about Google Trends, which, as the scientific literature demonstrates, is related to many real-world phenomena (e.g. epidemiology, economy, political science). Design/methodology/approach: The proposed experimental framework allows the integration of Google search query data and Twitter social data. As new trends emerge in Google searches, the pipeline interrogates Twitter to track, also geographically, the feelings and emotions of Twitter users about new trends. The core of the pipeline is represented by a sentiment analysis framework that make use of a Bayesian machine learning device exploiting deep natural language processing modules to assign emotions and sentiment orientations to a collection of tweets geolocalized on the microblogging platform. The pipeline is accessible as a web service for any user authorized with credentials. Findings: The employment of the pipeline for three different monitoring task (i.e. consumer electronics, healthcare, and politics) shows the plausibility of the proposed approach in order to measure social media sentiments and emotions concerning the trends emerged on Google searches. Originality/value: The proposed approach aims to bridge the gap among Google search query data and sentiments that emerge on Twitter about these trends.