Hsinchun Chen

Hsinchun Chen

Professor, Management Information Systems
Regents Professor
Member of the Graduate Faculty
Professor, BIO5 Institute
Primary Department
Contact
(520) 621-4153

Research Interest

Dr Chen's areas of expertise include:Security informatics, security big data; smart and connected health, health analytics; data, text, web mining.Digital library, intelligent information retrieval, automatic categorization and classification, machine learning for IR, large-scale information analysis and visualization.Internet resource discovery, digital libraries, IR for large-scale scientific and business databases, customized IR, multilingual IR.Knowledge-based systems design, knowledge discovery in databases, hypertext systems, machine learning, neural networks computing, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing.Cognitive modeling, human-computer interactions, IR behaviors, human problem-solving process.

Publications

Benjamin, V., Chung, W., Abbasi, A., Chuang, J., Larson, C. A., & Chen, H. (2013). Evaluating text visualization: An experiment in authorship analysis. IEEE ISI 2013 - 2013 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics: Big Data, Emergent Threats, and Decision-Making in Security Informatics, 16-20.

Abstract:

Analyzing authorship of online texts is an important analysis task in security-related areas such as cybercrime investigation and counter-terrorism, and in any field of endeavor in which authorship may be uncertain or obfuscated. This paper presents an automated approach for authorship analysis using machine learning methods, a robust stylometric feature set, and a series of visualizations designed to facilitate analysis at the feature, author, and message levels. A testbed consisting of 506,554 forum messages, in English and Arabic, from 14,901 authors was first constructed. A prototype portal system was then developed to support feasibility analysis of the approach. A preliminary evaluation to assess the efficacy of the text visualizations was conducted. The evaluation showed that task performance with the visualization functions was more accurate and more efficient than task performance without the visualizations. © 2013 IEEE.

Abbasi, A., Chen, H., & Salem, A. (2008). Sentiment analysis in multiple languages: Feature selection for opinion classification in Web forums. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 26(3).

Abstract:

The Internet is frequently used as a medium for exchange of information and opinions, as well as propaganda dissemination. In this study the use of sentiment analysis methodologies is proposed for classification of Web forum opinions in multiple languages. The utility of stylistic and syntactic features is evaluated for sentiment classification of English and Arabic content. Specific feature extraction components are integrated to account for the linguistic characteristics of Arabic. The entropy weighted genetic algorithm (EWGA) is also developed, which is a hybridized genetic algorithm that incorporates the information-gain heuristic for feature selection. EWGA is designed to improve performance and get a better assessment of key features. The proposed features and techniques are evaluated on a benchmark movie review dataset and U.S. and Middle Eastern Web forum postings. The experimental results using EWGA with SVM indicate high performance levels, with accuracies of over 91% on the benchmark dataset as well as the U.S. and Middle Eastern forums. Stylistic features significantly enhanced performance across all testbeds while EWGA also outperformed other feature selection methods, indicating the utility of these features and techniques for document-level classification of sentiments. © 2008 ACM.

Hauck, R. V., Atabakhsh, H., Ongvasith, P., Gupta, H., & Chen, H. (2002). Using coplink to analyze criminal-justice data. Computer, 35(3), 30-37.

Abstract:

The Coplink project has been initiated to address the problems in criminal justice systems. University of Arizona researchers originally generated the concept space approach to facilitate sematic retrieval of information. User studies show that this system also improves searching and browsing in the engineering and biomedicine domains.

Hsinchun, C. (2007). Exploring extremism and terrorism on the web: The Dark Web project. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 4430 LNCS, 1-20.

Abstract:

In this paper we discuss technical issues regarding intelligence and security informatics (ISI) research to accomplish the critical missions of international security and counter-terrorism. We propose a research framework addressing the technical challenges facing counter-terrorism and crime-fighting applications with a primary focus on the knowledge discovery from databases (KDD) perspective. We also present several Dark Web related case studies for open-source terrorism information collection, analysis, and visualization. Using a web spidering approach, we have developed a large-scale, longitudinal collection of extremist-generated Internet-based multimedia and multilingual contents. We have also developed selected computational link analysis, content analysis, and authorship analysis techniques to analyze the Dark Web collection. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.

Leroy, G., Chen, H., & Martinez, J. D. (2003). A shallow parser based on closed-class words to capture relations in biomedical text. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 36(3), 145-158.

PMID: 14615225;Abstract:

Natural language processing for biomedical text currently focuses mostly on entity and relation extraction. These entities and relations are usually pre-specified entities, e.g., proteins, and pre-specified relations, e.g., inhibit relations. A shallow parser that captures the relations between noun phrases automatically from free text has been developed and evaluated. It uses heuristics and a noun phraser to capture entities of interest in the text. Cascaded finite state automata structure the relations between individual entities. The automata are based on closed-class English words and model generic relations not limited to specific words. The parser also recognizes coordinating conjunctions and captures negation in text, a feature usually ignored by others. Three cancer researchers evaluated 330 relations extracted from 26 abstracts of interest to them. There were 296 relations correctly extracted from the abstracts resulting in 90% precision of the relations and an average of 11 correct relations per abstract. © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.