Prof. Sebastián Maldonado
Department of Management Control and Information Systems, School of Economics and Business, University of Chile, Chile
Transformer-based text classification for business analytics and public safety
Deep learning (DL) has received increasing attention in the last decade, becoming the de facto solution for several machine learning tasks, including computer vision, signal processing, or text analytics. For the latter application, attention mechanisms based on transformers have significantly improved the performance of DL models on natural language tasks. This gain has opened new possibilities for research in text analytics, creating new opportunities for improving decision-making. In this talk, we first focus on business analytics, automating the analysis of complaints, inquiries, and customer feedback. Providing a prompt answer to customer claims and complaints, as well as analyzing the factors that affect the customer experience the most, are current trends in modern marketing. For the second part of the talk, we present a NLP application for crime analytics. The main goal is to design robust DL classifiers in the presence of noisy labels. We consider data from a crime app, in which users categorize safety reports by choosing one of the various options provided by the app. The users, however, tend to provide incorrect labels either because it is easier for them, e.g. by choosing the first alternative, or by intentionally exaggerating the importance of their reports.
Sebastián Maldonado is currently Full Professor at the Department of Management Control and Information Systems, School of Economics and Business, University of Chile. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Chile, in 2007, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chile, in 2011. Sebastián Maldonado has published more than 80 scientific contributions (WOS papers) in the last ten years. He was chair (president) of the Chilean chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and the Chilean chapter of the IFORS' Operational Research Society (ICHIO). He was also a member of the Academic Senate of the University of Chile, and author of the book "Analytics and Big Data: Data science applied to the business world" (ISBN: 978-84-18982-63-7). He is currently Associate Editor of the Information Sciences Journal. His research interests include machine learning, data mining and business analytics.