SLT-Based ELM for Big Social Data Analysis

Recently, social networks and other forms of media communication have been gathering the interest of both the scientific and the business world, leading to the increasing development of the science of opinion and sentiment analysis. Facing the huge amount of information present on the Web represents a crucial task and leads to the study and creation of efficient models able to tackle the task. To this end, current research proposes an efficient approach to support emotion recognition and polarity detection in natural language text. In this paper, we show how the most recent advances in statistical learning theory (SLT) can support the development of an efficient extreme learning machine (ELM) and the assessment of the resultant model’s performance when applied to big social data analysis. ELM, developed to overcome some issues in back-propagation networks, represents a powerful learning tool. However, the main problem is represented by the necessity to cope with a large number of available samples, and the generalization performance has to be carefully assessed. For this reason, we propose an ELM implementation that exploits the Spark distributed in memory technology and show how to take advantage of SLT results in order to select ELM hyperparameters able to provide the best generalization performance.