Text classification is a natural language processing (NLP) task relevant to many commercial applications, like e-commerce and customer service. Naturally, classifying such excerpts accurately often represents a challenge, due to intrinsic language aspects, like irony and nuance. To accomplish this task, one must provide a robust numerical representation for documents, a process known as embedding. Embedding represents a key NLP field nowadays, having faced a significant advance in the last decade, especially after the introduction of the word-to-vector concept and the popularization of Deep Learning models for solving NLP tasks, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformer-based Language Models (TLMs). Despite the impressive achievements in this field, the literature coverage regarding generating embeddings for Brazilian Portuguese texts is scarce, especially when considering commercial user reviews. Therefore, this work aims to provide a comprehensive experimental study of embedding approaches targeting a binary sentiment classification of user reviews in Brazilian Portuguese. This study includes from classical (Bag-of-Words) to state-of-the-art (Transformer-based) NLP models. The methods are evaluated with five open-source databases with pre-defined data partitions made available in an open digital repository to encourage reproducibility. The Fine-tuned TLMs achieved the best results for all cases, being followed by the Feature-based TLM, LSTM, and CNN, with alternate ranks, depending on the database under analysis.

通过通过可以捕获复杂的文本模式的大型语言模型来转移学习，BERT通过能够捕获复杂的文本模式，达到最先进的NLP应用程序来彻底改变了NLP字段。对于文本分类任务，BERT已被广泛探索。然而，在文献中，如何更好地应对如何更好地应对伯特输出层提供的不同嵌入物以及特定于语言的使用，而不是在文献中进行了很好的研究，特别是对于巴西葡萄牙语。本文的目的是进行广泛的实验研究，有关聚集在伯特输出层中产生的特征的不同策略的实验研究，重点是情感分析任务。该实验包括培训的BERT模型，培训了巴西葡萄牙语集团和多语言版本，考虑了具有预定义的培训，验证和测试分区的多种聚合策略和开源数据集，以便于效果的再现性。与TF-IDF相比，BERT达到了大多数情况下的最高ROC-AUC值。尽管如此，TF-IDF代表了预测性能和计算成本之间的良好权衡。

情感分析是最古典的，主要研究的自然语言处理任务之一。这个问题有一个值得注意的提前，主张更复杂和可扩展的机器学习模型。尽管存在这一进展，但巴西葡萄牙语仍然只处理了有限的语言资源，例如专用于情绪分类的数据集，特别是在考虑培训，测试和验证集中的预定义分区时，这将允许更公平地比较不同算法备择方案。这些问题的动机，这项工作分析了一系列文档嵌入策略的预测性能，假设极性作为系统结果。此分析包括在巴西葡萄牙语中的五种情感分析数据集，在单个数据集中统一，以及培训，测试和验证集中的引用分区，两者都通过数字存储库公开可用。进行不同上下文的数据集特定模型的交叉评估，以评估其泛化能力和采用唯一模型来解决所有方案的可行性。

The field of Automatic Music Generation has seen significant progress thanks to the advent of Deep Learning. However, most of these results have been produced by unconditional models, which lack the ability to interact with their users, not allowing them to guide the generative process in meaningful and practical ways. Moreover, synthesizing music that remains coherent across longer timescales while still capturing the local aspects that make it sound ``realistic'' or ``human-like'' is still challenging. This is due to the large computational requirements needed to work with long sequences of data, and also to limitations imposed by the training schemes that are often employed. In this paper, we propose a generative model of symbolic music conditioned by data retrieved from human sentiment. The model is a Transformer-GAN trained with labels that correspond to different configurations of the valence and arousal dimensions that quantitatively represent human affective states. We try to tackle both of the problems above by employing an efficient linear version of Attention and using a Discriminator both as a tool to improve the overall quality of the generated music and its ability to follow the conditioning signals.

Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) is becoming relevant with the growth of textual data; however, with the popularization of public large-scale datasets, some recent machine learning approaches have focused on dense models and architectures that, despite producing notable results, usually turn out in models difficult to interpret. Given the challenge behind interpretable learning-based text summarization and the importance it may have for evolving the current state of the ATS field, this work studies the application of two modern Generalized Additive Models with interactions, namely Explainable Boosting Machine and GAMI-Net, to the extractive summarization problem based on linguistic features and binary classification.

This work presents a thorough review concerning recent studies and text generation advancements using Generative Adversarial Networks. The usage of adversarial learning for text generation is promising as it provides alternatives to generate the so-called "natural" language. Nevertheless, adversarial text generation is not a simple task as its foremost architecture, the Generative Adversarial Networks, were designed to cope with continuous information (image) instead of discrete data (text). Thus, most works are based on three possible options, i.e., Gumbel-Softmax differentiation, Reinforcement Learning, and modified training objectives. All alternatives are reviewed in this survey as they present the most recent approaches for generating text using adversarial-based techniques. The selected works were taken from renowned databases, such as Science Direct, IEEEXplore, Springer, Association for Computing Machinery, and arXiv, whereas each selected work has been critically analyzed and assessed to present its objective, methodology, and experimental results.

Video segmentation consists of a frame-by-frame selection process of meaningful areas related to foreground moving objects. Some applications include traffic monitoring, human tracking, action recognition, efficient video surveillance, and anomaly detection. In these applications, it is not rare to face challenges such as abrupt changes in weather conditions, illumination issues, shadows, subtle dynamic background motions, and also camouflage effects. In this work, we address such shortcomings by proposing a novel deep learning video segmentation approach that incorporates residual information into the foreground detection learning process. The main goal is to provide a method capable of generating an accurate foreground detection given a grayscale video. Experiments conducted on the Change Detection 2014 and on the private dataset PetrobrasROUTES from Petrobras support the effectiveness of the proposed approach concerning some state-of-the-art video segmentation techniques, with overall F-measures of $\mathbf{0.9535}$ and $\mathbf{0.9636}$ in the Change Detection 2014 and PetrobrasROUTES datasets, respectively. Such a result places the proposed technique amongst the top 3 state-of-the-art video segmentation methods, besides comprising approximately seven times less parameters than its top one counterpart.

Scene change detection is an image processing problem related to partitioning pixels of a digital image into foreground and background regions. Mostly, visual knowledge-based computer intelligent systems, like traffic monitoring, video surveillance, and anomaly detection, need to use change detection techniques. Amongst the most prominent detection methods, there are the learning-based ones, which besides sharing similar training and testing protocols, differ from each other in terms of their architecture design strategies. Such architecture design directly impacts on the quality of the detection results, and also in the device resources capacity, like memory. In this work, we propose a novel Multiscale Cascade Residual Convolutional Neural Network that integrates multiscale processing strategy through a Residual Processing Module, with a Segmentation Convolutional Neural Network. Experiments conducted on two different datasets support the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving average overall $\boldsymbol{F\text{-}measure}$ results of $\boldsymbol{0.9622}$ and $\boldsymbol{0.9664}$ over Change Detection 2014 and PetrobrasROUTES datasets respectively, besides comprising approximately eight times fewer parameters. Such obtained results place the proposed technique amongst the top four state-of-the-art scene change detection methods.

Research on remote sensing image classification significantly impacts essential human routine tasks such as urban planning and agriculture. Nowadays, the rapid advance in technology and the availability of many high-quality remote sensing images create a demand for reliable automation methods. The current paper proposes two novel deep learning-based architectures for image classification purposes, i.e., the Discriminant Deep Image Prior Network and the Discriminant Deep Image Prior Network+, which combine Deep Image Prior and Triplet Networks learning strategies. Experiments conducted over three well-known public remote sensing image datasets achieved state-of-the-art results, evidencing the effectiveness of using deep image priors for remote sensing image classification.

The acquisition of high-quality human annotations through crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is more challenging than expected. The annotation quality might be affected by various aspects like annotation instructions, Human Intelligence Task (HIT) design, and wages paid to annotators, etc. To avoid potentially low-quality annotations which could mislead the evaluation of automatic summarization system outputs, we investigate the recruitment of high-quality MTurk workers via a three-step qualification pipeline. We show that we can successfully filter out bad workers before they carry out the evaluations and obtain high-quality annotations while optimizing the use of resources. This paper can serve as basis for the recruitment of qualified annotators in other challenging annotation tasks.