NLP

Text Analysis in Python for Social Scientists – Prediction and Classification

Text contains a wealth of information about about a wide variety of sociocultural constructs. Automated prediction methods can infer these quantities (sentiment analysis is probably the most well-known application). However, there is virtually no …

Learning from Disagreement: A Survey

Many tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) offer evidence that humans disagree, from objective tasks such as part-of-speech tagging to more subjective tasks such as classifying an image or deciding whether a proposition …

Five sources of bias in natural language processing

Recently, there has been an increased interest in demographically grounded bias in natural language processing (NLP) applications. Much of the recent work has focused on describing bias and providing an overview of bias in a larger context. Here, we …

On the Gap between Adoption and Understanding in NLP

There are some issues with current research trends in NLP that can hamper the free development of scientific research. We identify five of particular concern: 1) the early adoption of methods without sufficient understanding or analysis; 2) the …

Pre-training is a Hot Topic: Contextualized Document Embeddings Improve Topic Coherence

Topic models extract groups of words from documents, whose interpretation as a topic hopefully allows for a better understanding of the data. However, the resulting word groups are often not coherent, making them harder to interpret. Recently, neural …

Exposing the limits of Zero-shot Cross-lingual Hate Speech Detection

Reducing and counter-acting hate speech on Social Media is a significant concern. Most of the proposed automatic methods are conducted exclusively on English and very few consistently labeled, non-English resources have been proposed. Learning to …

'We will Reduce Taxes' - Identifying Election Pledges with Language Models

In an election campaign, political parties pledge to implement various projects--should they be elected. But do they follow through? To track election pledges from parties' election manifestos, we need to distinguish between pledges and general …

HONEST: Measuring Hurtful Sentence Completion in Language Models

Language models have revolutionized the field of NLP. However, language models capture and proliferate hurtful stereotypes, especially in text generation. Our results show that **4.3% of the time, language models complete a sentence with a hurtful …

The Importance of Modeling Social Factors of Language: Theory and Practice

Natural language processing (NLP) applications are now more powerful and ubiquitous than ever before. With rapidly developing (neural) models and ever-more available data, current NLP models have access to more information than any human speaker …

Language in a (Search) Box: Grounding Language Learning in Real-World Human-Machine Interaction

We investigate grounded language learning through real-world data, by modelling a teacher-learner dynamics through the natural interactions occurring between users and search engines.