Dominican Republic

Framing has significant but subtle effects on public opinion and policy. We propose an NLP framework to measure entity-centric frames. We use it to understand media coverage on police violence in the United States in a new Police Violence Frames Corpus of 82k news articles spanning 7k police killings. Our work uncovers more than a dozen framing devices and reveals significant differences in the way liberal and conservative news sources frame both the issue of police violence and the entities involved. Conservative sources emphasize when the victim is armed or attacking an officer and are more likely to mention the victim&#39;s criminal record. Liberal sources focus more on the underlying systemic injustice, highlighting the victim&#39;s race and that they were unarmed. We discover temporary spikes in these injustice frames near high-profile shooting events, and finally, we show protest volume correlates with and precedes media framing decisions.

EMNLP 2021

To Protect and To Serve? Analyzing Entity-Centric Framing of Police Violence

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

Framing has significant but subtle effects on public opinion and policy. We propose an NLP framework to measure entity-centric frames. We use it to understand media coverage on police violence in the United States in a new Police Violence Frames Corpus of 82k news articles spanning 7k police killings. Our work uncovers more than a dozen framing devices and reveals significant differences in the way liberal and conservative news sources frame both the issue of police violence and the entities involved. Conservative sources emphasize when the victim is armed or attacking an officer and are more likely to mention the victim's criminal record. Liberal sources focus more on the underlying systemic injustice, highlighting the victim's race and that they were unarmed. We discover temporary spikes in these injustice frames near high-profile shooting events, and finally, we show protest volume correlates with and precedes media framing decisions.

technical paper

Morality plays an important role in social well-being, but people's moral perception is not stable and changes over time. Recent advances in natural language processing have shown that text is an effective medium for informing moral change, but no attempt has been made to quantify the origins of these changes. We present a novel unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change toward entities through time. We characterize moral change with probabilistic topical distributions and infer the source text that exerts prominent influence on the moral time course. We evaluate our framework on a diverse set of data ranging from social media to news articles. We show that our framework not only captures fine-grained human moral judgments, but also identifies coherent source topics of moral change triggered by historical events. We apply our methodology to analyze the news in the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrate its utility in identifying sources of moral change in high-impact and real-time social events.

An unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change

Growing polarization of the news media has been blamed for fanning disagreement, controversy and even violence. Early identification of polarized topics is thus an urgent matter that can help mitigate conflict. However, accurate measurement of topic-wise polarization is still an open research challenge. To address this gap, we propose Partisanship-aware Contextualized Topic Embeddings (PaCTE), a method to automatically detect polarized topics from partisan news sources. Specifically, utilizing a language model that has been finetuned on recognizing partisanship of the news articles, we represent the ideology of a news corpus on a topic by corpus-contextualized topic embedding and measure the polarization using cosine distance. We apply our method to a dataset of news articles about the COVID-19 pandemic. Extensive experiments on different news sources and topics demonstrate the efficacy of our method to capture topical polarization, as indicated by its effectiveness of retrieving the most polarized topics.

Detecting Polarized Topics Using Partisanship-aware Contextualized Topic Embeddings

Framing a news article means to portray the reported event from a specific perspective, e.g., from an economic or a health perspective. Reframing means to change this perspective. Depending on the audience or the submessage, reframing can become necessary to achieve the desired effect on the readers. Reframing is related to adapting style and sentiment, which can be tackled with neural text generation techniques. However, it is more challenging since changing a frame requires rewriting entire sentences rather than single phrases. In this paper, we study how to computationally reframe sentences in news articles while maintaining their coherence to the context. We treat reframing as a sentence-level fill-in-the-blank task for which we train neural models on an existing media frame corpus. To guide the training, we propose three strategies: framed-language pretraining, named-entity preservation, and adversarial learning. We evaluate respective models automatically and manually for topic consistency, coherence, and successful reframing. Our results indicate that generating properly-framed text works well but with tradeoffs.

Controlled Neural Sentence-Level Reframing of News Articles

While large-scale pretrained language models have been shown to learn effective linguistic representations for many NLP tasks, there remain many real-world contextual aspects of language that current approaches do not capture. For instance, consider a cloze test “I enjoyed the _____ game this weekend”: the correct answer depends heavily on where the speaker is from, when the utterance occurred, and the speaker’s broader social milieu and preferences. Although language depends
heavily on the geographical, temporal, and other social contexts of the speaker, these elements have not been incorporated into modern transformer-based language models. We propose a simple but effective approach to incorporate speaker social context into the learned representations of large-scale language models. Our method first learns dense representations of social contexts using graph representation learning algorithms and then primes language model pretraining with these social
context representations. We evaluate our approach on geographically-sensitive language modeling tasks and show a substantial improvement (more than 100% relative lift on MRR) compared to baselines.

LMSOC: An Approach for Socially Sensitive Pretraining

We investigate predictors of anti-Asian hate among Twitter users throughout COVID-19. With the rise of xenophobia and polarization that has accompanied widespread social media usage in many nations, online hate has become a major social issue, attracting many researchers. Here, we apply natural language processing techniques to characterize social media users who began to post anti-Asian hate messages during COVID-19. We compare two user groups—those who posted anti-Asian slurs and those who did not—with respect to a rich set of features measured with data prior to COVID-19 and show that it is possible to predict who later publicly posted anti-Asian slurs. Our analysis of predictive features underlines the potential impact of news media and information sources that report on online hate and calls for further investigation into the role of polarized communication networks and news media.

Predicting Anti-Asian Hateful Users on Twitter during COVID-19

Existing sarcasm detection systems focus on exploiting linguistic markers, context, or user-level priors.
However, social studies suggest that the relationship between the author and the audience can be equally relevant for the sarcasm usage and interpretation.
In this work, we propose a framework jointly leveraging (1) a user context from their historical tweets together with (2) the social information from a user's neighborhood in an interaction graph, to contextualize the interpretation of the post. We distinguish between perceived and self-reported sarcasm identification. We use graph attention networks (GAT) over users and tweets in a conversation thread, combined with various dense user history representations. 
Apart from achieving state-of-the-art results on the recently published dataset of 19k Twitter users with 30K labeled tweets, adding 10M unlabeled tweets as context, our experiments indicate that the graph network contributes to interpreting the sarcastic intentions of the author more than to predicting the sarcasm perception by others.

Perceived and Intended Sarcasm Detection with Graph Attention Networks

Research on open-domain dialogue systems that allow free topics is challenging in the field of natural language processing (NLP). 
The performance of the dialogue system has been improved recently by the method utilizing dialogue-related knowledge; however, non-English dialogue systems suffer from reproducing the performance of English dialogue systems because securing knowledge in the same language with the dialogue system is relatively difficult.
Through experiments with a Korean dialogue system, this paper proves that the performance of a non-English dialogue system can be improved by utilizing English knowledge, highlighting the system uses cross-lingual knowledge.
For the experiments, we 1) constructed a Korean version of the Wizard of Wikipedia dataset, 2) built Korean-English T5 (KE-T5), a language model pre-trained with Korean and English corpus, and 3) developed a knowledge-grounded Korean dialogue model based on KE-T5.
We observed the performance improvement in the open-domain Korean dialogue model even only English knowledge was given.
The experimental results showed that the knowledge inherent in cross-lingual language models can be helpful for generating responses in open dialogue systems.

A Model of Cross-Lingual Knowledge-Grounded Response Generation for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems

Current approaches to empathetic response generation focus on learning a model to predict an emotion label and generate a response based on this label and have achieved promising results.
However, the emotion cause, an essential factor for empathetic responding, is ignored. The emotion cause is a stimulus for human emotions. Recognizing the emotion cause is helpful to better understand human emotions so as to generate more empathetic responses.
To this end, we propose a novel framework that improves empathetic response generation by recognizing emotion cause in conversations. Specifically, an emotion reasoner is designed to predict a context emotion label and a sequence of emotion cause-oriented labels, which indicate whether the word is related to the emotion cause. Then we devise both hard and soft gated attention mechanisms to incorporate the emotion cause into response generation.
Experiments show that incorporating emotion cause information improves the performance of the model on both emotion recognition and response generation.

Improving Empathetic Response Generation by Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations

Recommendation dialogs require the system to build a social bond with users to gain trust and develop affinity in order to increase the chance of a successful recommendation. It is beneficial to divide up, such conversations with multiple subgoals (such as social chat, question answering, recommendation, etc.), so that the system can retrieve appropriate knowledge with better accuracy under different subgoals. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for common knowledge-based multi-subgoal dialog: knowledge-enhanced multi-subgoal driven recommender system (KERS). We first predict a sequence of subgoals and use them to guide the dialog model to select knowledge from a sub-set of existing knowledge graph. We then propose three new mechanisms to filter noisy knowledge and to enhance the inclusion of cleaned knowledge in the dialog response generation process. Experiments show that our method obtains state-of-the-art results on DuRecDial dataset in both automatic and human evaluation.

KERS: A Knowledge-Enhanced Framework for Recommendation Dialog Systems with Multiple Subgoals

This paper investigates the effectiveness of pre-training for few-shot intent classification. While existing paradigms commonly further pre-train language models such as BERT on a vast amount of unlabeled corpus, we find it highly effective and efficient to simply fine-tune BERT with a small set of labeled utterances from public datasets. Specifically, fine-tuning BERT with roughly 1,000 labeled data yields a pre-trained model -- IntentBERT, which can easily surpass the performance of existing pre-trained models for few-shot intent classification on novel domains with very different semantics. The high effectiveness of IntentBERT confirms the feasibility and practicality of few-shot intent detection, and its high generalization ability across different domains suggests that intent classification tasks may share a similar underlying structure, which can be efficiently learned from a small set of labeled data. The source code can be found at https://github.com/hdzhang-code/IntentBERT.

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