CIDER: Context-sensitive polarity measurement for short-form text.

Researchers commonly perform sentiment analysis on large collections of short texts like tweets, Reddit posts or newspaper headlines that are all focused on a specific topic, theme or event. Usually, general-purpose sentiment analysis methods are used. These perform well on average but miss the variation in meaning that happens across different contexts, for example, the word "active" has a very different intention and valence in the phrase "active lifestyle" versus "active volcano". This work presents a new approach, CIDER (Context Informed Dictionary and sEmantic Reasoner), which performs context-sensitive linguistic analysis, where the valence of sentiment-laden terms is inferred from the whole corpus before being used to score the individual texts. In this paper, we detail the CIDER algorithm and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art generalist unsupervised sentiment analysis techniques on a large collection of tweets about the weather. CIDER is also applicable to alternative (non-sentiment) linguistic scales. A case study on gender in the UK is presented, with the identification of highly gendered and sentiment-laden days. We have made our implementation of CIDER available as a Python package: https://pypi.org/project/ciderpolarity/.

Does Gaia Play Dice? Simple Models of Non-Darwinian Selection.

In this article, we introduce some simple models, based on rolling dice, to explore mechanisms proposed to explain planetary habitability. The idea is to study these selection mechanisms in an analytically tractable setting, isolating their consequences from other details which can confound or obscure their effect in more realistic models. We find that the observable of interest, the face value shown on the die, "improves" over time in all models. For two of the more popular ideas, Selection by Survival and Sequential Selection, this is down to sampling effects. A modified version of Sequential Selection, Sequential Selection with Memory, implies a statistical tendency for systems to improve over time. We discuss the implications of this and its relationship to the ideas of the "Inhabitance Paradox" and the "Gaian bottleneck."

A critical analysis of the What3Words geocoding algorithm.

What3Words is a geocoding application that uses triples of words instead of alphanumeric coordinates to identify locations. What3Words has grown rapidly in popularity over the past few years and is used in logistical applications worldwide, including by emergency services. What3Words has also attracted criticism for being less reliable than claimed, in particular that the chance of confusing one address with another is high. This paper investigates these claims and shows that the What3Words algorithm for assigning addresses to grid boxes creates many pairs of confusable addresses, some of which are quite close together. The implications of this for the use of What3Words in critical or emergency situations is discussed.

C3-IoC: A Career Guidance System for Assessing Student Skills using Machine Learning and Network Visualisation.

Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) has witnessed significant growth over the last twenty-five years, providing a wide range of technologies to support academic, institutional, and administrative services. More recently, AIED applications have been developed to prepare students for the workforce, providing career guidance services for higher education. However, this remains challenging, especially concerning the rapidly changing labour market in the IT sector. In this paper, we introduce an AI-based solution named C3-IoC (https://c3-ioc.co.uk), which intends to help students explore career paths in IT according to their level of education, skills and prior experience. The C3-IoC presents a novel similarity metric method for relating existing job roles to a range of technical and non-technical skills. This also allows the visualisation of a job role network, placing the student within communities of job roles. Using a unique knowledge base, user skill profiling, job role matching, and visualisation modules, the C3-IoC supports students in self-evaluating their skills and understanding how they relate to emerging IT jobs. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40593-022-00317-y.

Selection principles for Gaia.

The Gaia hypothesis considers the life-environment coupled system as a single entity that acts to regulate and maintain habitable conditions on Earth. In this paper we discuss three mechanisms which could potentially lead to Gaia: Selection by Survival, Sequential Selection and Entropic Hierarchy. We use the Tangled Nature Model of co-evolution as a common framework for investigating all three, using an extended version of the standard model to elaborate on Gaia as an example of an entropic hierarchy. This idea, which combines sequential selection together with a reservoir of diversity that acts as a 'memory', implies a tendency towards growth and increasing resilience of the Gaian system over time. We then discuss how Gaian memory could be realised in practice via the microbial seed bank, climate refugia and lateral gene transfer and conclude by discussing testable implications of an entropic hierarchy for the study of Earth history and the search for life in the universe. This paper adds to the existing taxonomy of Gaia hypotheses to suggest an "Entropic Gaia" where we argue that increasing biomass, complexity and enhanced habitability over time is a statistically likely feature of a co-evolving system.

Community-driven tree planting greens the neighbouring landscape.

Nature-based solutions to climate change are growing policy priorities yet remain hard to quantify. Here we use remote sensing to quantify direct and indirect benefits from community-led agroforestry by The International Small group and Tree planting program (TIST) in Kenya. Since 2005, TIST-Kenya has incentivised smallholder farmers to plant trees for agricultural benefit and to sequester CO2. We use Landsat-7 satellite imagery to examine the effect on the historically deforested landscape around Mount Kenya. We identify positive greening trends in TIST groves during 2000-2019 relative to the wider landscape. These groves cover 27,198 ha, and a further 27,750 ha of neighbouring agricultural land is also positively influenced by TIST. This positive 'spill-over' impact of TIST activity occurs at up to 360 m distance. TIST also benefits local forests, e.g. through reducing fuelwood and fodder extraction. Our results show that community-led initiatives can lead to successful landscape-scale regreening on decadal timescales.

Social Sensing of Heatwaves.

Heatwaves cause thousands of deaths every year, yet the social impacts of heat are poorly measured. Temperature alone is not sufficient to measure impacts and "heatwaves" are defined differently in different cities/countries. This study used data from the microblogging platform Twitter to detect different scales of response and varying attitudes to heatwaves within the United Kingdom (UK), the United States of America (US) and Australia. At the country scale, the volume of heat-related Twitter activity increased exponentially as temperature increased. The initial social reaction differed between countries, with a larger response to heatwaves elicited from the UK than from Australia, despite the comparatively milder conditions in the UK. Language analysis reveals that the UK user population typically responds with concern for individual wellbeing and discomfort, whereas Australian and US users typically focus on the environmental consequences. At the city scale, differing responses are seen in London, Sydney and New York on governmentally defined heatwave days; sentiment changes predictably in London and New York over a 24-h period, while sentiment is more constant in Sydney. This study shows that social media data can provide robust observations of public response to heat, suggesting that social sensing of heatwaves might be useful for preparedness and mitigation.

Studying the UK job market during the COVID-19 crisis with online job ads.

The COVID-19 global pandemic and the lockdown policies enacted to mitigate it have had profound effects on the labour market. Understanding these effects requires us to obtain and analyse data in as close to real time as possible, especially as rules change rapidly and local lockdowns are enacted. This work studies the UK labour market by analysing data from the online job board Reed.co.uk, using topic modelling and geo-inference methods to break down the data by sector and geography. I also study how the salary, contract type, and mode of work have changed since the COVID-19 crisis hit the UK in March. Overall, vacancies were down by 60 to 70% in the first weeks of lockdown. By the end of the year numbers had recovered somewhat, but the total job ad deficit is measured to be over 40%. Broken down by sector, vacancies for hospitality and graduate jobs are greatly reduced, while there were more care work and nursing vacancies during lockdown. Differences by geography are less significant than between sectors, though there is some indication that local lockdowns stall recovery and less badly hit areas may have experienced a smaller reduction in vacancies. There are also small but significant changes in the salary distribution and number of full time and permanent jobs. As well as the analysis, this work presents an open methodology that enables a rapid and detailed survey of the job market in unsettled conditions and describes a web application jobtrender.com that allows others to query this data set.

A social Beaufort scale to detect high winds using language in social media posts.

People often talk about the weather on social media, using different vocabulary to describe different conditions. Here we combine a large collection of wind-related Twitter posts (tweets) and UK Met Office wind speed observations to explore the relationship between tweet volume, tweet language and wind speeds in the UK. We find that wind speeds are experienced subjectively relative to the local baseline, so that the same absolute wind speed is reported as stronger or weaker depending on the typical weather conditions in the local area. Different linguistic tokens (words and emojis) are associated with different wind speeds. These associations can be used to create a simple text classifier to detect 'high-wind' tweets with reasonable accuracy; this can be used to detect high winds in a locality using only a single tweet. We also construct a 'social Beaufort scale' to infer wind speeds based only on the language used in tweets. Together with the classifier, this demonstrates that language alone is indicative of weather conditions, independent of tweet volume. However, the number of high-wind tweets shows a strong temporal correlation with local wind speeds, increasing the ability of a combined language-plus-volume system to successfully detect high winds. Our findings complement previous work in social sensing of weather hazards that has focused on the relationship between tweet volume and severity. These results show that impacts of wind and storms are found in how people communicate and use language, a novel dimension in understanding the social impacts of extreme weather.

Projections of coral cover and habitat change on turbid reefs under future sea-level rise.

Global sea-level rise (SLR) is projected to increase water depths above coral reefs. Although the impacts of climate disturbance events on coral cover and three-dimensional complexity are well documented, knowledge of how higher sea levels will influence future reef habitat extent and bioconstruction is limited. Here, we use 31 reef cores, coupled with detailed benthic ecological data, from turbid reefs on the central Great Barrier Reef, Australia, to model broad-scale changes in reef habitat following adjustments to reef geomorphology under different SLR scenarios. Model outputs show that modest increases in relative water depth above reefs (Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5) over the next 100 years will increase the spatial extent of habitats with low coral cover and generic diversity. More severe SLR (RCP8.5) will completely submerge reef flats and move reef slope coral communities below the euphotic depth, despite the high vertical accretion rates that characterize these reefs. Our findings suggest adverse future trajectories associated with high emission climate scenarios which could threaten turbid reefs globally and their capacity to act as coral refugia from climate change.

Scaling laws in geo-located Twitter data.

Twitter has become an important platform for geo-spatial analyses, providing high-volume spatial data on a wide variety of social processes. Understanding the relationship between population density and Twitter activity is therefore of key importance. This study reports a systematic relationship between population density and Twitter use. Number of tweets, number of users and population per unit area are related by power law functions with exponents greater than one. These relations are consistent with each other and hold across a range of spatial scales. This implies that population density can accurately predict Twitter activity, but importantly, it also implies that correct predictions are not given by a naive linear scaling analysis. The observed super-linearity has implications for any spatial analyses performed with Twitter data and is important for understanding the relationship between Twitter use and demographics. For example, the robustness of this relationship means that we can identify 'anomalous' geographic areas that deviate from the observed trend, identifying several towns with high/low usage relative to expectation; using the scaling relationship we are able to show that these anomalies are not caused by age structure, as has been previously proposed. Proper consideration of this scaling relationship will improve robustness in future geo-spatial studies using Twitter.

The human geography of Twitter: Quantifying regional identity and inter-region communication in England and Wales.

Given the centrality of regions in social movements, politics and public administration, here we aim to quantitatively study regional identity, cross-region communication and sentiment. This paper presents a new methodology to study social interaction within and between social-geographic regions, and then applies the methodology to a case study of England and Wales. We use a social network, built from geo-located Twitter data, to identify contiguous geographical regions with a shared social identity and then investigate patterns of communication within and between them. In contrast to other approaches (e.g. using phone call data records or online friendship networks), use of Twitter data provides message contents as well as social connections. This allows us to investigate not only the volume of communication between locations, but also the sentiment and vocabulary used in the messages. For example, our case study shows: a significant dialect difference between England and Wales; that regions tend to be more positive about themselves than about others, with the South being more 'self-regarding' than the North; and that people talk politics much more between regions than within. This study demonstrates how social media can be used to quantify regional identity and inter-region communications and sentiment, exposing these previously hard-to-observe geographic concepts to analysis.

@choo: Tracking Pollen and Hayfever in the UK Using Social Media.

Allergic rhinitis (hayfever) affects a large proportion of the population in the United Kingdom. Although relatively easily treated with medication, symptoms nonetheless have a substantial adverse effect on wellbeing during the summer pollen season. Provision of accurate pollen forecasts can help sufferers to manage their condition and minimise adverse effects. Current pollen forecasts in the UK are based on a sparse network of pollen monitoring stations. Here, we explore the use of "social sensing" (analysis of unsolicited social media content) as an alternative source of pollen and hayfever observations. We use data from the Twitter platform to generate a dynamic spatial map of pollen levels based on user reports of hayfever symptoms. We show that social sensing alone creates a spatiotemporal pollen measurement with remarkable similarity to measurements taken from the established physical pollen monitoring network. This demonstrates that social sensing of pollen can be accurate, relative to current methods, and suggests a variety of future applications of this method to help hayfever sufferers manage their condition.

Social sensing of floods in the UK.

"Social sensing" is a form of crowd-sourcing that involves systematic analysis of digital communications to detect real-world events. Here we consider the use of social sensing for observing natural hazards. In particular, we present a case study that uses data from a popular social media platform (Twitter) to detect and locate flood events in the UK. In order to improve data quality we apply a number of filters (timezone, simple text filters and a naive Bayes 'relevance' filter) to the data. We then use place names in the user profile and message text to infer the location of the tweets. These two steps remove most of the irrelevant tweets and yield orders of magnitude more located tweets than we have by relying on geo-tagged data. We demonstrate that high resolution social sensing of floods is feasible and we can produce high-quality historical and real-time maps of floods using Twitter.

AKT: ancestry and kinship toolkit.

MOTIVATION: Ancestry and Kinship Toolkit (AKT) is a statistical genetics tool for analysing large cohorts of whole-genome sequenced samples. It can rapidly detect related samples, characterize sample ancestry, calculate correlation between variants, check Mendel consistency and perform data clustering. AKT brings together the functionality of many state-of-the-art methods, with a focus on speed and a unified interface. We believe it will be an invaluable tool for the curation of large WGS datasets. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code is available at https://illumina.github.io/akt CONTACTS: joconnell@illumina.com or rudy.d.arthur@gmail.comSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Rapid genotype refinement for whole-genome sequencing data using multi-variate normal distributions.

MOTIVATION: Whole-genome low-coverage sequencing has been combined with linkage-disequilibrium (LD)-based genotype refinement to accurately and cost-effectively infer genotypes in large cohorts of individuals. Most genotype refinement methods are based on hidden Markov models, which are accurate but computationally expensive. We introduce an algorithm that models LD using a simple multivariate Gaussian distribution. The key feature of our algorithm is its speed. RESULTS: Our method is hundreds of times faster than other methods on the same data set and its scaling behaviour is linear in the number of samples. We demonstrate the performance of the method on both low- and high-coverage samples. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code is available at https://github.com/illumina/marvin CONTACT: rarthur@illumina.com SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.