NLP

Twitter Healthy Conversations

Devising Metrics for Assessing Echo Chambers, Incivility, and Intolerance on Twitter

A Case for Soft Loss Functions

Recently, Peterson et al. provided evidence of the benefits of using probabilistic soft labels generated from crowd annotations for training a computer vision model, showing that using such labels maximizes performance of the models over unseen data. …

Fake opinion detection: how similar are crowdsourced datasets to real data?

Identifying deceptive online reviews is a challenging tasks for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Collecting corpora for the task is difficult, because normally it is not possible to know whether reviews are genuine. A common workaround involves …

Dense Node Representation for Geolocation

Prior research has shown that geolocation can be substantially improved by including user network information. While effective, it suffers from the curse of dimensionality, since networks are usually represented as sparse adjacency matrices of …

Geolocation with Attention-Based Multitask Learning Models

Geolocation, predicting the location of a post based on text and other information, has a huge potential for several social media applications. Typically, the problem is modeled as either multi-class classification or regression. In the first case, …

Hey Siri. Ok Google. Alexa: A topic modeling of user reviews for smart speakers

User reviews provide a significant source of information for companies to understand their market and audience. In order to discover broad trends in this source, researchers have typically used topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). …

Identifying Linguistic Areas for Geolocation

Geolocating social media posts relies on the assumption that language carries sufficient geographic information. However, locations are usually given as continuous latitude/longitude tuples, so we first need to define discrete geographic regions …

Women’s Syntactic Resilience and Men’s Grammatical Luck: Gender-Bias in Part-of-Speech Tagging and Dependency Parsing

Several linguistic studies have shown the prevalence of various lexical and grammatical patterns in texts authored by a person of a particular gender, but models for part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing have still not adapted to account for …

Capturing Regional Variation with Distributed Place Representations and Geographic Retrofitting

Dialects are one of the main drivers of language variation, a major challenge for natural language processing tools. In most languages, dialects exist along a continuum, and are commonly discretized by combining the extent of several preselected …

Comparing Bayesian Models of Annotation

The analysis of crowdsourced annotations in natural language processing is concerned with identifying (1) gold standard labels, (2) annotator accuracies and biases, and (3) item difficulties and error patterns. Traditionally, majority voting was used …