United States

Much previous work characterizing language variation across Internet social groups has focused on the types of words used by these groups. We extend this type of study by employing BERT to characterize variation in the senses of words as well, analyzing two months of English comments in 474 Reddit communities. The specificity of different sense clusters to a community, combined with the specificity of a community&#39;s unique word types, is used to identify cases where a social group&#39;s language deviates from the norm. We validate our metrics using user-created glossaries and draw on sociolinguistic theories to connect language variation with trends in community behavior. We find that communities with highly distinctive language are medium-sized, and their loyal and highly engaged users interact in dense networks.

NAACL 2021

Characterizing English Variation across Social Media Communities with BERT

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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Much previous work characterizing language variation across Internet social groups has focused on the types of words used by these groups. We extend this type of study by employing BERT to characterize variation in the senses of words as well, analyzing two months of English comments in 474 Reddit communities. The specificity of different sense clusters to a community, combined with the specificity of a community's unique word types, is used to identify cases where a social group's language deviates from the norm. We validate our metrics using user-created glossaries and draw on sociolinguistic theories to connect language variation with trends in community behavior. We find that communities with highly distinctive language are medium-sized, and their loyal and highly engaged users interact in dense networks.

technical paper

Cant is important for understanding advertising, comedies and dog-whistle politics. However, computational research on cant is hindered by a lack of available datasets. In this paper, we propose a large and diverse Chinese dataset for creating and understanding cant from a computational linguistics perspective. We formulate a task for cant understanding and provide both quantitative and qualitative analysis for tested word embedding similarity and pretrained language models. Experiments suggest that such a task requires deep language understanding, common sense, and world knowledge and thus can be a good testbed for pretrained language models and help models perform better on other tasks.

Blow the Dog Whistle: A Chinese Dataset for Cant Understanding with Common Sense and World Knowledge

In the automatic evaluation of generative question answering (GenQA) systems, it is difficult to assess the correctness of generated answers due to the free-form of the answer. Especially, widely used n-gram similarity metrics often fail to discriminate the incorrect answers since they equally consider all of the tokens. To alleviate this problem, we propose KPQA-metric, a new metric for evaluating the correctness of GenQA. Specifically, our new metric assigns different weights to each token via keyphrase prediction, thereby judging whether a generated answer sentence captures the key meaning of the reference answer. To evaluate our metric, we create high-quality human judgments of correctness on two GenQA datasets. Using our human-evaluation datasets, we show that our proposed metric has a significantly higher correlation with human judgments than existing metrics.

KPQA: A Metric for Generative Question Answering Using Keyphrase Weights

The current COVID-19 pandemic has lead to the creation of many corpora that facilitate NLP research and downstream applications to help fight the pandemic. However, most of these corpora are exclusively for English. As the pandemic is a global problem, it is worth creating COVID-19 related datasets for languages other than English. In this paper, we present the first manually-annotated COVID-19 domain-specific dataset for Vietnamese. Particularly, our dataset is annotated for the named entity recognition (NER) task with newly-defined entity types that can be used in other future epidemics. Our dataset also contains the largest number of entities compared to existing Vietnamese NER datasets. We empirically conduct experiments using strong baselines on our dataset, and find that: automatic Vietnamese word segmentation helps improve the NER results and the highest performances are obtained by fine-tuning pre-trained language models where the monolingual model PhoBERT for Vietnamese produces higher results than the multilingual model XLM-R. We publicly release our dataset at: https://github.com/VinAIResearch/PhoNER_COVID19

COVID-19 Named Entity Recognition for Vietnamese

New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community's lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a large-scale analysis of over 80k neologisms in 4420 online communities across a decade. Using Poisson regression and survival analysis, our study demonstrates that the community's network structure plays a significant role in lexical change. Apart from overall size, properties including dense connections, the lack of local clusters and more external contacts promote lexical innovation and retention. Unlike offline communities, these topic-based communities do not experience strong lexical levelling despite increased contact but accommodate more niche words. Our work provides support for the sociolinguistic hypothesis that lexical change is partially shaped by the structure of the underlying network but also uncovers findings specific to online communities.

The structure of online social networks modulates the rate of lexical change

Understanding how news media frame political issues is important due to its impact on public attitudes, yet hard to automate. Computational approaches have largely focused on classifying the frame of a full news article while framing signals are often subtle and local. Furthermore, automatic news analysis is a sensitive domain, and existing classifiers lack transparency in their predictions. This paper addresses both issues with a novel semi-supervised model, which jointly learns to embed local information about the events and related actors in a news article through an auto-encoding framework, and to leverage this signal for document-level frame classification. Our experiments show that: our model outperforms previous models of frame prediction; we can further improve performance with unlabeled training data leveraging the semi-supervised nature of our model; and the learnt event and actor embeddings intuitively corroborate the document-level predictions, providing a nuanced and interpretable article frame representation.

Framing Unpacked: A Semi-Supervised Interpretable Multi-View Model of Media Frames

The framing of political issues can influence policy and public opinion. Even though the public plays a key role in creating and spreading frames, little is known about how ordinary people on social media frame political issues. By creating a new dataset of immigration-related tweets labeled for multiple framing typologies from political communication theory, we develop supervised models to detect frames. We demonstrate how users' ideology and region impact framing choices, and how a message's framing influences audience responses. We find that the more commonly-used issue-generic frames obscure important ideological and regional patterns that are only revealed by immigration-specific frames. Furthermore, frames oriented towards human interests, culture, and politics are associated with higher user engagement. This large-scale analysis of a complex social and linguistic phenomenon contributes to both NLP and social science research.

Modeling Framing in Immigration Discourse on Social Media

This study introduces and analyzes WikiTalkEdit, a dataset of conversations and edit histories from Wikipedia, for research in online cooperation and conversation modeling. The dataset comprises dialog triplets from the Wikipedia Talk pages, and editing actions on the corresponding articles being discussed. The exchanges occur between two turn-taking individuals and span all of Wikipedia. We show how the data supports the classic understanding of style matching, where positive emotion and the use of first-person pronouns predict a positive emotional change in a Wikipedia contributor. However, they do not predict editorial behavior. On the other hand, feedback invoking evidentiality and criticism, and references to Wikipedia's community norms, is more likely to persuade the contributor to perform edits but is less likely to lead to a positive emotion. We developed baseline classifiers trained on pre-trained RoBERTa features that can predict editorial change with an F1 score of .54, as compared to an F1 score of .66 for predicting emotional change. A diagnostic analysis of persisting errors is also provided. We conclude with possible applications and recommendations for future work. The dataset is publicly available for the research community at https://github.com/kj2013/WikiTalkEdit/

WikiTalkEdit: A Dataset for modeling Editors' behaviors on Wikipedia

The speech act of complaining is used by humans to communicate a negative mismatch between reality and expectations as a reaction to an unfavorable situation. Linguistic theory of pragmatics categorizes complaints into various severity levels based on the face-threat that the complainer is willing to undertake. This is particularly useful for understanding the intent of complainers and how humans develop suitable apology strategies. In this paper, we study the severity level of complaints for the first time in computational linguistics. To facilitate this, we enrich a publicly available data set of complaints with four severity categories and train different transformer-based networks combined with linguistic information achieving 55.7 macro F1. We also jointly model binary complaint classification and complaint severity in a multi-task setting achieving new state-of-the-art results on binary complaint detection reaching up to 88.2 macro F1. Finally, we present a qualitative analysis of the behavior of our models in predicting complaint severity levels.

Modeling the Severity of Complaints in Social Media

In common law, the outcome of a new case is determined mostly by precedent cases, rather than by existing statutes. However, how exactly does the precedent influence the outcome of a new case? Answering this question is crucial for guaranteeing fair and consistent judicial decision-making. We are the first to approach this question computationally by comparing two longstanding jurisprudential views; Halsbury's, who believes that the arguments of the precedent are the main determinant of the outcome, and Goodhart's, who believes that what matters most is the precedent's facts. We base our study on the corpus of legal cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which allows us to access not only the case itself, but also cases cited in the judges' arguments (i.e. the precedent cases). Taking an information-theoretic view, and modelling the question as a case outcome classification task, we find that the precedent's arguments share 0.38 nats of information with the case's outcome, whereas precedent's facts only share 0.18 nats of information (i.e., 58% less); suggesting Halsbury's view may be more accurate in this specific court. We found however in a qualitative analysis that there are specific statues where Goodhart's view dominates, and present some evidence these are the ones where the legal concept at hand is less straightforward.

What About the Precedent: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Common Law

Building NLP systems that serve everyone requires accounting for dialect differences. But dialects are not monolithic entities: rather, distinctions between and within dialects are captured by the presence, absence, and frequency of dozens of dialect features in speech and text, such as the deletion of the copula in "He {} running". In this paper, we introduce the task of dialect feature detection, and present two multitask learning approaches, both based on pretrained transformers. For most dialects, large-scale annotated corpora for these features are unavailable, making it difficult to train recognizers. We train our models on a small number of minimal pairs, building on how linguists typically define dialect features. Evaluation on a test set of 22 dialect features of Indian English demonstrates that these models learn to recognize many features with high accuracy, and that a few minimal pairs can be as effective for training as thousands of labeled examples. We also demonstrate the downstream applicability of dialect feature detection both as a measure of dialect density and as a dialect classifier.

Characterizing English Variation across Social Media Communities with BERT

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