United States

Social media platforms such as Twitter or Reddit have become an integral part in political opinion formation and discussions, accompanied by potential echo chamber forming. In this paper, we examine the relationships between the interaction patterns, the opinion polarity, and the socio-demographic characteristics in discussion communities on Reddit. On a dataset of over 2 million posts coming from over 20k users, we combine network community detection algorithms, reliable stance polarity annotations, and NLP- based socio-demographic estimations, to identify echo chambers and understand their properties at scale. We show that the separability of the interaction communities is more strongly correlated to the relative socio-demographic divide, rather than the stance polarity gap size. We further demonstrate that the socio-demographic classifiers have a strong topical bias and should be used with caution, merely for the relative community difference comparisons within a topic, rather than for any absolute labeling.

NAACL 2022

OK Boomer: Probing the socio-demographic Divide in Echo Chambers

echo chambers socio-demographics socialnlp community detection homophily social media author profiling

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

workshop paper

Several high-profile events, such as the mass testing of emotion recognition systems on vulnerable sub-populations and using question answering systems to make moral judgments, have highlighted how technology will often lead to more adverse outcomes for those that are already marginalized. At issue here are not just individual systems and datasets, but also the AI tasks themselves. In this talk, I make a case for thinking about ethical considerations not just at the level of individual models and datasets, but also at the level of AI tasks. I will present a new form of such an effort, Ethics Sheets for AI Tasks, dedicated to fleshing out the assumptions and ethical considerations hidden in how a task is commonly framed and in the choices we make regarding the data, method, and evaluation. I will also present a template for ethics sheets with 50 ethical considerations, using the task of emotion recognition as a running example. Ethics sheets are a mechanism to engage with and document ethical considerations before building datasets and systems. Similar to survey articles, a small number of ethics sheets can serve numerous researchers and developers. I will wrap things up with concrete steps for students and early researchers.

Ethics Sheets for Social NLP: Task-Specific Guides to Responsible Research

This paper describes an ongoing endeavor to construct Pavia Verbs Database (PaVeDa) – an open-access typological resource that builds upon previous work on verb argument structure, and in particular upon the Valency Patterns Leipzig (ValPaL) project. The PaVeDa database brings four major innovations as compared to the ValPaL database: (i) it includes data from ancient languages and thus takes into account the diachronic dimension; (ii) it comprises data of modern languages from families that are not represented in the ValPaL; (iii) it is linked to external corpora that are used as sources of usage-based examples of stored patterns; (iv) it introduces a new cross-linguistic layer of annotation for valency patterns which will allow for contrastive data visualization.

PaVeDa - Pavia Verbs Database: Challenges and Perspectives

The capabilities and limitations of BERT and similar models are still unclear when it comes to learning syntactic abstractions, in particular across languages. In this paper, we use the task of subordinate-clause detection within and across languages to probe these properties. We show that this task is deceptively simple, with easy gains offset by a long tail of harder cases, and that BERT's zero-shot performance is dominated by word-order effects, mirroring the SVO/VSO/SOV typology.

Word-order typology in Multilingual BERT: A case study in subordinate-clause detection

Metonymy is regarded by most linguists as a universal cognitive phenomenon, especially since the emergence of the theory of conceptual mappings. However, the field data backing up claims of universality has not been large enough so far to provide conclusive evidence. We introduce a large-scale analysis of metonymy based on a lexical corpus of over 20 thousand metonymy instances from 189 languages and 69 genera. No prior study, to our knowledge, is based on linguistic coverage as broad as ours. Drawing on corpus analysis, evidence of universality is found at three levels: systematic metonymy in general, particular metonymy patterns, and specific metonymy concepts.

How Universal is Metonymy? Results from a Large-Scale Multilingual Analysis

The SIGTYP 2022 shared task concerns the problem of word reflex generation in a target language, given cognate words from a subset of related languages. We present two systems to tackle this problem, covering two very different modeling approaches. The first model extends transformer-based encoder-decoder sequence-to-sequence modeling, by encoding all available input cognates in parallel, and having the decoder attend to the resulting joint representation during inference. The second approach takes inspiration from the field of image restoration, where models are tasked with recovering pixels in an image that have been masked out. For reflex generation, the missing reflexes are treated as ``masked pixels'' in an ``image'' which is a representation of an entire cognate set across a language family. As in the image restoration case, cognate restoration is performed with a convolutional network.

Mockingbird at the SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task: Two Types of Models for
the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes

In this talk I will describe the benefit of implemented grammars as well as the challenges involved in creating them. I present an inference system that can be used to automatically generate such grammars on the basis of interlinear glossed text (IGT) corpra. The inference system, called BASIL -- Building Analyses from Syntactic Inference in Local Languages, leverages typologically informed heuristics to infer syntactic and morphological information from linguistic corpora to select analyses that model the language. We will engage with the question of whether and to what extent typological features are apparent in IGT data and how effectively grammars generated with these features can model human language.

Grammar Inference for Local Languages: Leveraging Typology for Automatic Grammar Generation

Though recently there have been an increased interest in how pre-trained language models encode different linguistic features, there is still a lack of systematic comparison between languages with different morphology and syntax. In this paper, using BERT as an example of a pre-trained model, we compare how three typologically different languages (English, Korean, and Russian) encode morphology and syntax features across different layers. In particular, we contrast languages which differ in a particular aspect, such as flexibility of word order, head directionality, morphological type, presence of grammatical gender, and morphological richness, across four different tasks.

Cross-linguistic comparison of linguistic feature encoding in BERT models
for typologically different languages

We study the extent to which emoji can be used to add interpretability to embeddings of text and emoji. To do so, we extend the POLAR-framework that transforms word embeddings to interpretable counterparts and apply it to word-emoji embeddings trained on four years of messaging data from the Jodel social network. We devise a crowdsourced human judgement experiment to study six usecases, evaluating against words only, what role emoji can play in adding interpretability to word embeddings. That is, we use a revised POLAR approach interpreting words and emoji with words, emoji or both according to human judgement. We find statistically significant trends demonstrating that emoji can
be used to interpret other emoji very well.

Interpreting Emoji with Emoji: 🏖️ => ☀️😎🌊

This paper presents a new iconic language, the IKON language, and its philosophical, linguis­tic, and graphical principles. We examine some case studies to highlight the semantic complex­ity of the visual representation of meanings. We also introduce the Iconometer test to vali­date our icons and their application to the med­ical domain, through the creation of iconic sen­tences.

Beyond Emoji: an insight into the IKON language

Identifying sarcasm is a challenging research problem owing to its highly contextual nature. Several researchers have attempted numerous mechanisms to incorporate context, linguistic aspects, and supervised and semi-supervised techniques to determine sarcasm. It has also been noted that emojis in a text may also hold key indicators of sarcasm. However, the availability of sarcasm datasets with emojis is scarce. This makes it challenging to effectively study the sarcastic nature of emojis. In this work, we present SarcOji which has been compiled from five publicly available sarcasm datasets. SarcOji contains labeled English texts which all have emojis. We also analyze SarcOji to determine if there is an incongruence in the polarity of text and emojis used therein. Further, emojis’ usage, occurrences, and positions in the context of sarcasm are also studied in this compiled dataset. With SarcOji we have been able to demonstrate that frequency of occurrence of an emoji and its position are strong indicators of sarcasm. SarcOji dataset is now publicly available with several derived features like sentiment scores of text and emojis, most frequent emoji, and its position in the text. Compilation of the SarcOji dataset is an initial step to enable the study of the role of emojis in communicating sarcasm. SarcOji dataset can also serve as a go-to dataset for various emoji-based sarcasm detection techniques.

OK Boomer: Probing the socio-demographic Divide in Echo Chambers

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