Social media features substantial stylistic variation, raising new challenges for syntactic analysis of online writing. However, this variation is often aligned with author attributes such as age, gender, and geography, as well as more readily-available social network metadata. In this paper, we report new evidence on the link between language and social networks in the task of part-of-speech tagging. We find that tagger error rates are correlated with network structure, with high accuracy in some parts of the network, and lower accuracy elsewhere. As a result, tagger accuracy depends on training from a balanced sample of the network, rather than training on texts from a narrow subcommunity. We also describe our attempts to add robustness to stylistic variation, by building a mixture-of-experts model in which each expert is associated with a region of the social network. While prior work found that similar approaches yield performance improvements in sentiment analysis and entity linking, we were unable to obtain performance improvements in part-of-speech tagging, despite strong evidence for the link between part-of-speech error rates and social network structure.
Demiroren Teknoloji A.S.（德米罗伦技术公司）；Istanbul Technical University（伊斯坦布尔理工大学）；MEF University（MEF大学）
Named entity recognition (NER) is an extensively studied task that extracts and classifies named entities in a text. NER is crucial not only in downstream language processing applications such as relation extraction and question answering but also in large scale big data operations such as real-time analysis of online digital media content. Recent research efforts on Turkish, a less studied language with morphologically rich nature, have demonstrated the effectiveness of neural architectures on well-formed texts and yielded state-of-the art results by formulating the task as a sequence tagging…
Social media data such as Twitter messages ("tweets") pose a particular challenge to NLP systems because of their short, noisy, and colloquial nature. Tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and syntactic parsing require highly domain-matched training data for good performance. To date, there is no complete training corpus for both NER and syntactic analysis (e.g., part of speech tagging, dependency parsing) of tweets. While there are some publicly available annotated NLP datasets of tweets, they are only designed for individual tasks. In this study, we aim to create Tweebank-NER, an Engl…
Symanto Research（Symanto研究院）；University of Malta（马耳他大学）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）
Inspired by Labov's seminal work on stylistic variation as a function of social stratification, we develop and compare neural models that predict a person's presumed socio-economic status, obtained through distant supervision,from their writing style on social media. The focus of our work is on identifying the most important stylistic parameters to predict socio-economic group. In particular, we show the effectiveness of morpho-syntactic features as stylistic predictors of socio-economic group,in contrast to lexical features, which are good predictors of topic.
IT University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根信息技术大学）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）
Lexical normalization, the translation of non-canonical data to standard language, has shown to improve the performance of manynatural language processing tasks on social media. Yet, using multiple languages in one utterance, also called code-switching (CS), is frequently overlooked by these normalization systems, despite its common use in social media. In this paper, we propose three normalization models specifically designed to handle code-switched data which we evaluate for two language pairs: Indonesian-English (Id-En) and Turkish-German (Tr-De). For the latter, we introduce novel normaliz…
Sentiment analysis has been an active area of research in the past two decades and recently, with the advent of social media, there has been an increasing demand for sentiment analysis on social media texts. Since the social media texts are not in one language and are largely code-mixed in nature, the traditional sentiment classification models fail to produce acceptable results. This paper tries to solve this very research problem and uses bi-directional LSTMs along with language tagging, to facilitate sentiment tagging of code-mixed Tamil texts that have been extracted from social media. The…
With Internet users constantly leaving a trail of text, whether through blogs, emails, or social media posts, the ability to write and protest anonymously is being eroded because artificial intelligence, when given a sample of previous work, can match text with its author out of hundreds of possible candidates. Existing approaches to authorship anonymization, also known as authorship obfuscation, often focus on protecting binary demographic attributes rather than identity as a whole. Even those that do focus on obfuscating identity require manual feedback, lose the coherence of the original se…
Fine-tuning neural networks is widely used to transfer valuable knowledge from high-resource to low-resource domains. In a standard fine-tuning scheme, source and target problems are trained using the same architecture. Although capable of adapting to new domains, pre-trained units struggle with learning uncommon target-specific patterns. In this paper, we propose to augment the target-network with normalised, weighted and randomly initialised units that beget a better adaptation while maintaining the valuable source knowledge. Our experiments on POS tagging of social media texts (Tweets domai…
Automatic Normalization of Word Variations in Code-Mixed Social Media Text
Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC)（语言技术研究中心）；Kohli Center on Intelligent Systems (KCIS)（科利智能系统中心）；International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
Customers are rapidly turning to social media for customer support. While brand agents on these platforms are motivated and well-intentioned to help and engage with customers, their efforts are often ignored if their initial response to the customer does not match a specific tone, style, or topic the customer is aiming to receive. The length of a conversation can reflect the effort and quality of the initial response made by a brand toward collaborating and helping consumers, even when the overall sentiment of the conversation might not be very positive. Thus, through this study, we aim to bri…
Ruhr University Bochum（波鸿鲁尔大学）；Bucknell University（巴克内尔大学）
Authorship verification is the task of analyzing the linguistic patterns of two or more texts to determine whether they were written by the same author or not. The analysis is traditionally performed by experts who consider linguistic features, which include spelling mistakes, grammatical inconsistencies, and stylistics for example. Machine learning algorithms, on the other hand, can be trained to accomplish the same, but have traditionally relied on so-called stylometric features. The disadvantage of such features is that their reliability is greatly diminished for short and topically varied …
Product name recognition is a significant practical problem, spurred by the greater availability of platforms for discussing products such as social media and product review functionalities of online marketplaces. Customers, product manufacturers and online marketplaces may want to identify product names in unstructured text to extract important insights, such as sentiment, surrounding a product. Much extant research on product name identification has been domain-specific (e.g., identifying mobile phone models) and used supervised or semi-supervised methods. With massive numbers of new product…
We evaluate a simple approach to improving zero-shot multilingual transfer of mBERT on social media corpus by adding a pretraining task called translation pair prediction (TPP), which predicts whether a pair of cross-lingual texts are a valid translation. Our approach assumes access to translations (exact or approximate) between source-target language pairs, where we fine-tune a model on source language task data and evaluate the model in the target language. In particular, we focus on language pairs where transfer learning is difficult for mBERT: those where source and target languages are di…
Institute of Engineering and Technology（工程技术学院）；Indian Institute of Technology（印度理工学院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
In the past few years, social media has risen as a platform where people express and share personal incidences about abuse, violence and mental health issues. There is a need to pinpoint such posts and learn the kind of response expected. For this purpose, we understand the sentiment that a personal story elicits on different posts present on different social media sites, on the topics of abuse or mental health. In this paper, we propose a method supported by hand-crafted features to judge if the post requires an empathetic response. The model is trained upon posts from various web-pages and c…
Sciences Po（巴黎政治学院）；École nationale des chartes（法国国立文献学院）；Université Paris, Sciences & Lettres（巴黎文理研究大学）
A series of social media posts signed under the pseudonym "Q", started a movement known as QAnon, which led some of its most radical supporters to violent and illegal actions. To identify the person(s) behind Q, we evaluate the coincidence between the linguistic properties of the texts written by Q and to those written by a list of suspects provided by journalistic investigation. To identify the authors of these posts, serious challenges have to be addressed. The "Q drops" are very short texts, written in a way that constitute a sort of literary genre in itself, with very peculiar features of …
