Punjabi University Ph.D. Scholars developed tool for social media tweets in English and Punjabi
Kanwar Inder Singh/ royalpatiala.in/ Patiala
Two Ph.D. researchers Neetika Bansal and Mukhtiar Singh of the Department of Computer Science, Punjabi University, Patiala have developed a web-based LI-SA tool that is capable of identifying the languages in social media code mixed tweets, normalizing it and then analysing the sentiments of tweets as positive, negative, or neutral. Since decades, social media has been gaining popularity and has become indispensable part of everyday life, whether it is reading, shopping, cooking, chatting, and anything else. Noticing the recent trends and interests of the society at a large in Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc. Prof. Vishal Goyal took a strong initiative for the development of such software in 2016. This initiative was turned into reality, when Neetika Bansal, Assistant Professor, College of Engineering and Management, Rampura Phul and Mukhtiar Singh resident of the village Santokh Singh Wala, tehsil Jalalabad, district Fazilka developed LI-SA tool with their unremitting efforts. In the development of this software, Neetika Bansal has taken a lead in completing the task of identifying the English and Punjabi the romanized text used in social media and normalizing it to its standard form while, Mukhtiar Singh, research scholar from the Department of Computer Science has made a significant contribution to the sentiment analysis of the social media text.
Highlighting the importance of this software, Prof. Simple Rani, Punjabi Yadavindra College of Engineering, Talwandi Sabo stated that as Punjabi social media text is confined not only to the Punjabis in India but also those living abroad hence this software uses worldwide data. Dr. Sahil Raj, Assistant Professor, School of Management Studies, Punjabi University told that data set of this software includes 10 lakh posts from Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp.
Elaborating the features of this software Ms. Neetika told that it can be used even by the people not well versed with computer technology. With this software, user can identify the language of the text entered, normalize it and can perform sentiment analysis with just one click. With this software even those people who don’t know Punjabi language can comprehend the basic sentiments conveyed through the post. Moreover, this software helps in understanding the novel short forms used in the posts.
Mukhtiar Singh further explained that people these days use mixed language while tweeting like “tera ki haal h, gd hai. Aj kee krda hai”. In this tweet, lot of challenges are there. To start with finding which word actually refers to what?, then converting the word into correct English word or Punjabi word in the tweet and finally analysing the sentiment of the tweet. Moreover, when we were collecting the data, the tweets were in raw form and it took us approximately 1.5 years for collecting the data, then cleaning the data. It was in blended mode–using computer programming and manually, which is very tiresome and laborious task.
Prof. Vishal Goyal added that the youngsters communicate frankly with their friends and relatives on social media. While earlier school children have always been refrained from continuous use of phones, laptops, tabs, and other electronic devices, but in the present COVID-19 period electronic devices have become an important source of education for them. All these factors contribute to more complex social media data, as they inculcate creativity in spellings. He also appreciated the hard toil of both the Ph.D. researchers and concluded that the journey for this software is not ended here; the software needs to be updated at regular intervals.
Dr. Dharam Veer Sharma, Head of the department congratulated the team and expressed his happiness by saying that the Department of Computer Science, Punjabi University Patiala always produce products out of most of the researches being done in the department.
Dr. G.S.Batra, Dean(Research), Punjabi University, Patiala told that Department of Computer Science, Punjabi University, Patiala has always taken lead in doing research that is of practical use and is of use for society. It is witnessed that recently Prof. Vishal Goyal has released his software on Announcement System at Railways and Airports for specially abled.
December 14,2020
