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Despite legislative attempts to curtail financial statement fraud, it continues unabated. This study makes a renewed attempt to aid in detecting this misconduct using linguistic analysis with data mining on narrative sections of annual reports/10-K form. Different from the features used in similar research, this paper extracts three distinct sets of features from a newly constructed corpus of narratives (408 annual reports/10-K, 6.5 million words) from fraud and non-fraud firms. Separately each of these three sets of features is put through a suite of classification algorithms, to determine classifier performance in this binary fraud/non-fraud discrimination task. From the results produced, there is a clear indication that the language deployed by management engaged in wilful falsification of firm performance is discernibly different from truth-tellers. For the first time, this new interdisciplinary research extracts features for readability at a much deeper level, attempts to draw out collocations using n-grams and measures tone using appropriate financial dictionaries. This linguistic analysis with machine learning-driven data mining approach to fraud detection could be used by auditors in assessing financial reporting of firms and early detection of possible misdemeanours.

On 9/11, many Americans were introduced to an Islamic movement called Salafism, the theological strand that includes Al Qaeda. Since then, Salafism, an important and popular movement in global Islam, has frequently been disparaged as 'Radical Islam' or 'Islamic fundamentalism.' Scripture People is the first book-length study of the embattled American Salafi movement and the challenges it has faced post-9/11. Matthew D. Taylor recounts how these so-called "Radical Muslims" have adopted deeply rooted American forms of religious belonging and values. Through comparison with American Evangelical Christianity, informed by his own Evangelical background and studies, Taylor explores the parallel impulses, convergent identities, and even surprising friendships that have emerged between Salafis and Evangelicals in America. Offering an entry point for understanding the dynamics and disagreements among American Muslims, Taylor's volume upends narratives about 'Radical Islam' by demonstrating how Salafi Muslims have flexibly adapted to American religious patterns in the twenty-first century.

Affective computing is an emerging interdisciplinary research field bringing together researchers and practitioners from various fields, ranging from artificial intelligence, natural language processing, to cognitive and social sciences. With the proliferation of videos posted online (e.g., on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) for product reviews, movie reviews, political views, and more, affective computing research has increasingly evolved from conventional unimodal analysis to more complex forms of multimodal analysis. This is the primary motivation behind our first of its kind, comprehensive literature review of the diverse field of affective computing. Furthermore, existing literature surveys lack a detailed discussion of state of the art in multimodal affect analysis frameworks, which this review aims to address. Multimodality is defined by the presence of more than one modality or channel, e.g., visual, audio, text, gestures, and eye gage. In this paper, we focus mainly on the use of audio, visual and text information for multimodal affect analysis, since around 90% of the relevant literature appears to cover these three modalities. Following an overview of different techniques for unimodal affect analysis, we outline existing methods for fusing information from different modalities. As part of this review, we carry out an extensive study of different categories of state-of-the-art fusion techniques, followed by a critical analysis of potential performance improvements with multimodal analysis compared to unimodal analysis. A comprehensive overview of these two complementary fields aims to form the building blocks for readers, to better understand this challenging and exciting research field.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging systems have been widely used in civil and military fields due to their all-weather and all-day abilities and various other advantages. However, due to image data exponentially increasing, there is a need for novel automatic target detection and recognition technologies. In recent years, the visual attention mechanism in the visual system has helped humans effectively deal with complex visual signals. In particular, biologically inspired top-down attention models have garnered much attention recently. This paper presents a visual attention model for SAR target detection, comprising a bottom-up stage and top-down process. In the bottom-up step, the Itti model is improved based on the difference between SAR and optical images. The top-down step fully utilizes prior information to further detect targets. Extensive detection experiments carried out on the benchmark Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) dataset show that, compared with typical visual models and other popular detection methods, our model has increased ability and robustness for SAR target detection, under a range of Signal to Clutter Ratio (SCR) conditions and scenes. In addition, results obtained using only the bottom-up stage are inferior to those of the proposed method, further demonstrating the effectiveness and rationality of a top-down strategy. In summary, our proposed visual attention method can be considered a potential benchmark resource for the SAR research community.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging systems have been widely used in civil and military fields due to their all-weather and all-day abilities and various other advantages. However, due to image data exponentially increasing, there is a need for novel automatic target detection and recognition technologies. In recent years, the visual attention mechanism in the visual system has helped humans effectively deal with complex visual signals. In particular, biologically inspired top-down attention models have garnered much attention recently. This paper presents a visual attention model for SAR target detection, comprising a bottom-up stage and top-down process. In the bottom-up step, the Itti model is improved based on the difference between SAR and optical images. The top-down step fully utilizes prior information to further detect targets. Extensive detection experiments carried out on the benchmark Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) dataset show that, compared with typical visual models and other popular detection methods, our model has increased ability and robustness for SAR target detection, under a range of Signal to Clutter Ratio (SCR) conditions and scenes. In addition, results obtained using only the bottom-up stage are inferior to those of the proposed method, further demonstrating the effectiveness and rationality of a top-down strategy. In summary, our proposed visual attention method can be considered a potential benchmark resource for the SAR research community.

With the advent of Internet, people actively express their opinions about products, services, events, political parties, etc., in social media, blogs, and website comments. The amount of research work on sentiment analysis is growing explosively. However, the majority of research efforts are devoted to English-language data, while a great share of information is available in other languages. We present a state-of-the-art review on multilingual sentiment analysis. More importantly, we compare our own implementation of existing approaches on common data. Precision observed in our experiments is typically lower than the one reported by the original authors, which we attribute to the lack of detail in the original presentation of those approaches. Thus, we compare the existing works by what they really offer to the reader, including whether they allow for accurate implementation and for reliable reproduction of the reported results.

Background: Global efforts toward the development and deployment of a vaccine for COVID-19 are rapidly advancing. To achieve herd immunity, widespread administration of vaccines is required, which necessitates significant cooperation from the general public. As such, it is crucial that governments and public health agencies understand public sentiments toward vaccines, which can help guide educational campaigns and other targeted policy interventions.Objective: The aim of this study was to develop and apply an artificial intelligence–based approach to analyze public sentiments on social media in the United Kingdom and the United States toward COVID-19 vaccines to better understand the public attitude and concerns regarding COVID-19 vaccines.Methods: Over 300,000 social media posts related to COVID-19 vaccines were extracted, including 23,571 Facebook posts from the United Kingdom and 144,864 from the United States, along with 40,268 tweets from the United Kingdom and 98,385 from the United States from March 1 to November 22, 2020. We used natural language processing and deep learning–based techniques to predict average sentiments, sentiment trends, and topics of discussion. These factors were analyzed longitudinally and geospatially, and manual reading of randomly selected posts on points of interest helped identify underlying themes and validated insights from the analysis.Results: Overall averaged positive, negative, and neutral sentiments were at 58%, 22%, and 17% in the United Kingdom, compared to 56%, 24%, and 18% in the United States, respectively. Public optimism over vaccine development, effectiveness, and trials as well as concerns over their safety, economic viability, and corporation control were identified. We compared our findings to those of nationwide surveys in both countries and found them to correlate broadly.Conclusions: Artificial intelligence–enabled social media analysis should be considered for adoption by institutions and governments alongside surveys and other conventional methods of ...