Author profiling is the characterization of an author through some key attributes such as gender, age, and language. In this paper, a RNN model with Attention (RNNwA) is proposed to predict the gender of a twitter user using their tweets. Both word level and tweet level attentions are utilized to learn 'where to look'. This model (https://github.com/Darg-Iztech/gender-prediction-from-tweets) is improved by concatenating LSA-reduced n-gram features with the learned neural representation of a user. Both models are tested on three languages: English, Spanish, Arabic. The improved version of the proposed model (RNNwA + n-gram) achieves state-of-the-art performance on English and has competitive results on Spanish and Arabic.
Transformer models have shown impressive performance on a variety of NLP tasks. Off-the-shelf, pre-trained models can be fine-tuned for specific NLP classification tasks, reducing the need for large amounts of additional training data. However, little research has addressed how much data is required to accurately fine-tune such pre-trained transformer models, and how much data is needed for accurate prediction. This paper explores the usability of BERT (a Transformer model for word embedding) for gender prediction on social media. Forensic applications include detecting gender obfuscation, e.g…
Improving Stance Detection by Leveraging Measurement Knowledge from Social Sciences: A Case Study of Dutch Political Tweets and Traditional Gender Role Division
Department of Methodology and Statistics（方法学与统计学系）
College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学人文与社会科学学院）；Carnegie Mellon University Qatar（卡内基梅隆大学卡塔尔分校）
In this paper, we present Arap-Tweet, which is a large-scale and multi-dialectal corpus of Tweets from 11 regions and 16 countries in the Arab world representing the major Arabic dialectal varieties. To build this corpus, we collected data from Twitter and we provided a team of experienced annotators with annotation guidelines that they used to annotate the corpus for age categories, gender, and dialectal variety. During the data collection effort, we based our search on distinctive keywords that are specific to the different Arabic dialects and we also validated the location using Twitter API…
This study analyzes the usage of Japanese gendered language on Twitter. Starting from a collection of 408 million Japanese tweets from 2015 till 2019 and an additional sample of 2355 manually classified Twitter accounts timelines into gender and categories (politicians, musicians, etc). A large scale textual analysis is performed on this corpus to identify and examine sentence-final particles (SFPs) and first-person pronouns appearing in the texts. It turns out that gendered language is in fact used also on Twitter, in about 6% of the tweets, and that the prescriptive classification into "male…
York University（约克大学）；K.N. Toosi University（K.N.图西理工大学）
Social media contains useful information about people and the society that could help advance research in many different areas (e.g. by applying opinion mining, emotion/sentiment analysis, and statistical analysis) such as business and finance, health, socio-economic inequality and gender vulnerability. User demographics provide rich information that could help study the subject further. However, user demographics such as gender are considered private and are not freely available. In this study, we propose a model based on transformers to predict the user's gender from their images and tweets.…
Social media is commonly used by the public during election campaigns to express their opinions regarding different issues. Among various social media channels, Twitter provides an efficient platform for researchers and politicians to explore public opinion regarding a wide range of topics such as the economy and foreign policy. Current literature mainly focuses on analyzing the content of tweets without considering the gender of users. This research collects and analyzes a large number of tweets and uses computational, human coding, and statistical analyses to identify topics in more than 300…
ParityYEG；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Dev Edmonton Society（埃德蒙顿发展协会）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Including diverse voices in political decision-making strengthens our democratic institutions. Within the Canadian political system, there is gender inequality across all levels of elected government. Online abuse, such as hateful tweets, leveled at women engaged in politics contributes to this inequity, particularly tweets focusing on their gender. In this paper, we present ParityBOT: a Twitter bot which counters abusive tweets aimed at women in politics by sending supportive tweets about influential female leaders and facts about women in public life. ParityBOT is the first artificial intell…
Nagoya University（名古屋大学）；JST, PRESTO（日本科学技术振兴机构，PRESTO）
Using machine learning algorithms, including deep learning, we studied the prediction of personal attributes from the text of tweets, such as gender, occupation, and age groups. We applied word2vec to construct word vectors, which were then used to vectorize tweet blocks. The resulting tweet vectors were used as inputs for training models, and the prediction accuracy of those models was examined as a function of the dimension of the tweet vectors and the size of the tweet blacks. The results showed that the machine learning algorithms could predict the three personal attributes of interest wit…
This paper addresses the task of user gender classification in social media, with an application to Twitter. The approach automatically predicts gender by leveraging observable information such as the tweet behavior, linguistic content of the user's Twitter feed and the celebrities followed by the user. This paper first evaluates linguistic content based features using LIWC dictionary and popular neighborhood features using Wikipedia and Freebase. Then augments both features which yielded a significant increase in the accuracy for gender prediction. Results show that rich linguistic features c…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Social media currently provide a window on our lives, making it possible to learn how people from different places, with different backgrounds, ages, and genders use language. In this work we exploit a newly-created Arabic dataset with ground truth age and gender labels to learn these attributes both individually and in a multi-task setting at the sentence level. Our models are based on variations of deep bidirectional neural networks. More specifically, we build models with gated recurrent units and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). We show the utility of multi-t…
Center for Computational Engineering and Networking（计算工程与网络中心）；Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore（科钦阿姆利塔工程学院）；Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amrita University, India（印度阿姆利塔大学阿姆利塔大学）
In this era of digitization, knowing the user's sociolect aspects have become essential features to build the user specific recommendation systems. These sociolect aspects could be found by mining the user's language sharing in the form of text in social media and reviews. This paper describes about the experiment that was performed in PAN Author Profiling 2017 shared task. The objective of the task is to find the sociolect aspects of the users from their tweets. The sociolect aspects considered in this experiment are user's gender and native language information. Here user's tweets written in…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所（哈马德·本·哈利法大学））
Gender analysis of Twitter can reveal important socio-cultural differences between male and female users. There has been a significant effort to analyze and automatically infer gender in the past for most widely spoken languages' content, however, to our knowledge very limited work has been done for Arabic. In this paper, we perform an extensive analysis of differences between male and female users on the Arabic Twitter-sphere. We study differences in user engagement, topics of interest, and the gender gap in professions. Along with gender analysis, we also propose a method to infer gender by …
The geolocation of online information is an essential component in any geospatial application. While most of the previous work on geolocation has focused on Twitter, in this paper we quantify and compare the performance of text-based geolocation methods on social media data drawn from both Blogger and Twitter. We introduce a novel set of location specific features that are both highly informative and easily interpretable, and show that we can achieve error rate reductions of up to 12.5% with respect to the best previously proposed geolocation features. We also show that despite posting longer …
University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）；University of Cologne（科隆大学）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
This paper presents a computational approach to author profiling taking gender and language variety into account. We apply an ensemble system with the output of multiple linear SVM classifiers trained on character and word $n$-grams. We evaluate the system using the dataset provided by the organizers of the 2017 PAN lab on author profiling. Our approach achieved 75% average accuracy on gender identification on tweets written in four languages and 97% accuracy on language variety identification for Portuguese.
Algorithms are widely applied to detect hate speech and abusive language in social media. We investigated whether the human-annotated data used to train these algorithms are biased. We utilized a publicly available annotated Twitter dataset (Founta et al. 2018) and classified the racial, gender, and party identification dimensions of 99,996 tweets. The results showed that African American tweets were up to 3.7 times more likely to be labeled as abusive, and African American male tweets were up to 77% more likely to be labeled as hateful compared to the others. These patterns were statistically…
Northwestern University（西北大学）；Feinberg School of Medicine（范伯格医学院）；Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago（芝加哥安与罗伯特·H·卢里儿童医院）；Northwestern Medicine（西北医学中心）
Over 12 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered at the time of writing. However, public perceptions of vaccines have been complex. We analyzed COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets to understand the evolving perceptions of COVID-19 vaccines. We finetuned a deep learning classifier using a state-of-the-art model, XLNet, to detect each tweet's sentiment automatically. We employed validated methods to extract the users' race or ethnicity, gender, age, and geographical locations from user profiles. Incorporating multiple data sources, we assessed the sentiment patterns among subpopulat…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Bias-measuring datasets play a critical role in detecting biased behavior of language models and in evaluating progress of bias mitigation methods. In this work, we focus on evaluating gender bias through coreference resolution, where previous datasets are either hand-crafted or fail to reliably measure an explicitly defined bias. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel method to collect diverse, natural, and minimally distant text pairs via counterfactual generation, and construct Counter-GAP, an annotated dataset consisting of 4008 instances grouped into 1002 quadruples. We furthe…
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国家技术大学）；Athens University of Economics and Business（雅典经济与商业大学）；Behavioral Signal Technologies（行为信号技术公司）；University of Athens（雅典大学）
In this paper we present a deep-learning model that competed at SemEval-2018 Task 2 "Multilingual Emoji Prediction". We participated in subtask A, in which we are called to predict the most likely associated emoji in English tweets. The proposed architecture relies on a Long Short-Term Memory network, augmented with an attention mechanism, that conditions the weight of each word, on a "context vector" which is taken as the aggregation of a tweet's meaning. Moreover, we initialize the embedding layer of our model, with word2vec word embeddings, pretrained on a dataset of 550 million English twe…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
Detecting offensive language on Twitter has many applications ranging from detecting/predicting bullying to measuring polarization. In this paper, we focus on building a large Arabic offensive tweet dataset. We introduce a method for building a dataset that is not biased by topic, dialect, or target. We produce the largest Arabic dataset to date with special tags for vulgarity and hate speech. We thoroughly analyze the dataset to determine which topics, dialects, and gender are most associated with offensive tweets and how Arabic speakers use offensive language. Lastly, we conduct many experim…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center（贝斯以色列女执事医疗中心）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）
Although approximately 50% of medical school graduates today are women, female physicians tend to be underrepresented in senior positions, make less money than their male counterparts and receive fewer promotions. There is a growing body of literature demonstrating gender bias in various forms of evaluation in medicine, but this work was mainly conducted by looking for specific words using fixed dictionaries such as LIWC and focused on recommendation letters. We use a dataset of written and quantitative assessments of medical student performance on individual shifts of work, collected across m…
University of Antioquia（安蒂奥基亚大学）；Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）
The interest in demographic information retrieval based on text data has increased in the research community because applications have shown success in different sectors such as security, marketing, heath-care, and others. Recognition and identification of demographic traits such as gender, age, location, or personality based on text data can help to improve different marketing strategies. For instance it makes it possible to segment and to personalize offers, thus products and services are exposed to the group of greatest interest. This type of technology has been discussed widely in document…
Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica（国立天体物理、光学与电子研究所）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Cuajimalpa (UAM-C)（墨西哥国立自治大学胡奇马尔帕分校）
The goal of Author Profiling (AP) is to identify demographic aspects (e.g., age, gender) from a given set of authors by analyzing their written texts. Recently, the AP task has gained interest in many problems related to computer forensics, psychology, marketing, but specially in those related with social media exploitation. As known, social media data is shared through a wide range of modalities (e.g., text, images and audio), representing valuable information to be exploited for extracting valuable insights from users. Nevertheless, most of the current work in AP using social media data has …
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校）
The #MeToo movement on Twitter has drawn attention to the pervasive nature of sexual harassment and violence. While #MeToo has been praised for providing support for self-disclosures of harassment or violence and shifting societal response, it has also been criticized for exemplifying how women of color have been discounted for their historical contributions to and excluded from feminist movements. Through an analysis of over 600,000 tweets from over 256,000 unique users, we examine online #MeToo conversations across gender and racial/ethnic identities and the topics that each demographic emph…
The Uli Dataset: An Exercise in Experience Led Annotation of oGBV
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Tattle Civic Tech（塔特尔公民科技）；Bebaak Collective（贝巴克集体）；National Council of Women Leaders（全国女性领袖委员会）；Chambal Media/Khabar Lahariya（昌巴尔媒体/赫拉哈里亚新闻）；Center for Internet and Society（互联网与社会中心）
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
It is important for machines to interpret human emotions properly for better human-machine communications, as emotion is an essential part of human-to-human communications. One aspect of emotion is reflected in the language we use. How to represent emotions in texts is a challenge in natural language processing (NLP). Although continuous vector representations like word2vec have become the new norm for NLP problems, their limitations are that they do not take emotions into consideration and can unintentionally contain bias toward certain identities like different genders. This thesis focuses o…
Universidad de Buenos Aires（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学）；CONICET（国家科学技术研究委员会）
Since BERT appeared, Transformer language models and transfer learning have become state-of-the-art for Natural Language Understanding tasks. Recently, some works geared towards pre-training specially-crafted models for particular domains, such as scientific papers, medical documents, user-generated texts, among others. These domain-specific models have been shown to improve performance significantly in most tasks. However, for languages other than English such models are not widely available. In this work, we present RoBERTuito, a pre-trained language model for user-generated text in Spanish,…
User representations are routinely used in recommendation systems by platform developers, targeted advertisements by marketers, and by public policy researchers to gauge public opinion across demographic groups. Computer scientists consider the problem of inferring user representations more abstractly; how does one extract a stable user representation - effective for many downstream tasks - from a medium as noisy and complicated as social media? The quality of a user representation is ultimately task-dependent (e.g. does it improve classifier performance, make more accurate recommendations in …
Computer Science Research \& Development, \ , Greece
Hate speech is a form of online harassment that involves the use of abusive language, and it is commonly seen in social media posts. This sort of harassment mainly focuses on specific group characteristics such as religion, gender, ethnicity, etc and it has both societal and economic consequences nowadays. The automatic detection of abusive language in text postings has always been a difficult task, but it is lately receiving much interest from the scientific community. This paper addresses the important problem of discerning hateful content in social media. The model we propose in this work i…
