This open access book provides an introduction and an overview of learning to quantify (a.k.a. “quantification”), i.e. the task of training estimators of class proportions in unlabeled data by means of supervised learning. In data science, learning to quantify is a task of its own related to classification yet different from it, since estimating class proportions by simply classifying all data and counting the labels assigned by the classifier is known to often return inaccurate (“biased”) class proportion estimates. The book introduces learning to quantify by looking at the supervised learning methods that can be used to perform it, at the evaluation measures and evaluation protocols that should be used for evaluating the quality of the returned predictions, at the numerous fields of human activity in which the use of quantification techniques may provide improved results with respect to the naive use of classification techniques, and at advanced topics in quantification research. The book is suitable to researchers, data scientists, or PhD students, who want to come up to speed with the state of the art in learning to quantify, but also to researchers wishing to apply data science technologies to fields of human activity (e.g., the social sciences, political science, epidemiology, market research) which focus on aggregate (“macro”) data rather than on individual (“micro”) data.

Opinion mining is a recent discipline at the crossroads of Information Retrieval and of Computational Linguistics which is concerned not with the topic a document is about, but with the opinion it expresses. It has a rich set of applications, ranging from tracking users' opinions about products or about political candidates as expressed in online forums, to customer relationship management. Functional to the extraction of opinions from text is the determination of the relevant entities of the language that are used to express opinions, and their opinion-related properties. For example, determining that the term beautiful casts a positive connotation to its subject. In this book we investigate on the automatic recognition of opinion-related properties of terms. This results into building opinion-related lexical resources, which can be used into opinion mining applications.