Online social media platforms increasingly rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to detect abusive content at scale in order to mitigate the harms it causes to their users. However, these techniques suffer from various sampling and ass
ociation biases present in training data, often resulting in sub-par performance on content relevant to marginalized groups, potentially furthering disproportionate harms towards them. Studies on such biases so far have focused on only a handful of axes of disparities and subgroups that have annotations/lexicons available. Consequently, biases concerning non-Western contexts are largely ignored in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a weakly supervised method to robustly detect lexical biases in broader geo-cultural contexts. Through a case study on a publicly available toxicity detection model, we demonstrate that our method identifies salient groups of cross-geographic errors, and, in a follow up, demonstrate that these groupings reflect human judgments of offensive and inoffensive language in those geographic contexts. We also conduct analysis of a model trained on a dataset with ground truth labels to better understand these biases, and present preliminary mitigation experiments.
Stance detection, which aims to determine whether an individual is for or against a target concept, promises to uncover public opinion from large streams of social media data. Yet even human annotation of social media content does not always capture
stance'' as measured by public opinion polls. We demonstrate this by directly comparing an individual's self-reported stance to the stance inferred from their social media data. Leveraging a longitudinal public opinion survey with respondent Twitter handles, we conducted this comparison for 1,129 individuals across four salient targets. We find that recall is high for both Pro'' and Anti'' stance classifications but precision is variable in a number of cases. We identify three factors leading to the disconnect between text and author stance: temporal inconsistencies, differences in constructs, and measurement errors from both survey respondents and annotators. By presenting a framework for assessing the limitations of stance detection models, this work provides important insight into what stance detection truly measures.
With the popularity of the current Internet age, online social platforms have provided a bridge for communication between private companies, public organizations, and the public. The purpose of this research is to understand the user's experience of
the product by analyzing product review data in different fields. We propose a BiLSTM-based neural network which infused rich emotional information. In addition to consider Valence and Arousal which is the smallest morpheme of emotional information, the dependence relationship between texts is also integrated into the deep learning model to analyze the sentiment. The experimental results show that this research can achieve good performance in predicting the vocabulary Valence and Arousal. In addition, the integration of VA and dependency information into the BiLSTM model can have excellent performance for social text sentiment analysis, which verifies that this model is effective in emotion recognition of social medial short text.
The wide reach of social media platforms, such as Twitter, have enabled many users to share their thoughts, opinions and emotions on various topics online. The ability to detect these emotions automatically would allow social scientists, as well as,
businesses to better understand responses from nations and costumers. In this study we introduce a dataset of 30,000 Persian Tweets labeled with Ekman's six basic emotions (Anger, Fear, Happiness, Sadness, Hatred, and Wonder). This is the first publicly available emotion dataset in the Persian language. In this paper, we explain the data collection and labeling scheme used for the creation of this dataset. We also analyze the created dataset, showing the different features and characteristics of the data. Among other things, we investigate co-occurrence of different emotions in the dataset, and the relationship between sentiment and emotion of textual instances. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/nazaninsbr/Persian-Emotion-Detection.
Mental health is getting more and more attention recently, depression being a very common illness nowadays, but also other disorders like anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders, feeding disorders, autism, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders
. The huge amount of data from social media and the recent advances of deep learning models provide valuable means to automatically detecting mental disorders from plain text. In this article, we experiment with state-of-the-art methods on the SMHD mental health conditions dataset from Reddit (Cohan et al., 2018). Our contribution is threefold: using a dataset consisting of more illnesses than most studies, focusing on general text rather than mental health support groups and classification by posts rather than individuals or groups. For the automatic classification of the diseases, we employ three deep learning models: BERT, RoBERTa and XLNET. We double the baseline established by Cohan et al. (2018), on just a sample of their dataset. We improve the results obtained by Jiang et al. (2020) on post-level classification. The accuracy obtained by the eating disorder classifier is the highest due to the pregnant presence of discussions related to calories, diets, recipes etc., whereas depression had the lowest F1 score, probably because depression is more difficult to identify in linguistic acts.
Code-mixing (CM) is a frequently observed phenomenon that uses multiple languages in an utterance or sentence. There are no strict grammatical constraints observed in code-mixing, and it consists of non-standard variations of spelling. The linguistic
complexity resulting from the above factors made the computational analysis of the code-mixed language a challenging task. Language identification (LI) and part of speech (POS) tagging are the fundamental steps that help analyze the structure of the code-mixed text. Often, the LI and POS tagging tasks are interdependent in the code-mixing scenario. We project the problem of dealing with multilingualism and grammatical structure while analyzing the code-mixed sentence as a joint learning task. In this paper, we jointly train and optimize language detection and part of speech tagging models in the code-mixed scenario. We used a Transformer with convolutional neural network architecture. We train a joint learning method by combining POS tagging and LI models on code-mixed social media text obtained from the ICON shared task.
Since a lexicon-based approach is more elegant scientifically, explaining the solution components and being easier to generalize to other applications, this paper provides a new approach for offensive language and hate speech detection on social medi
a, which embodies a lexicon of implicit and explicit offensive and swearing expressions annotated with contextual information. Due to the severity of the social media abusive comments in Brazil, and the lack of research in Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese is the language used to validate the models. Nevertheless, our method may be applied to any other language. The conducted experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, outperforming the current baseline methods for the Portuguese language.
In this work, we provide an extensive part-of-speech analysis of the discourse of social media users with depression. Research in psychology revealed that depressed users tend to be self-focused, more preoccupied with themselves and ruminate more abo
ut their lives and emotions. Our work aims to make use of large-scale datasets and computational methods for a quantitative exploration of discourse. We use the publicly available depression dataset from the Early Risk Prediction on the Internet Workshop (eRisk) 2018 and extract part-of-speech features and several indices based on them. Our results reveal statistically significant differences between the depressed and non-depressed individuals confirming findings from the existing psychology literature. Our work provides insights regarding the way in which depressed individuals are expressing themselves on social media platforms, allowing for better-informed computational models to help monitor and prevent mental illnesses.
Cross-language authorship attribution is the challenging task of classifying documents by bilingual authors where the training documents are written in a different language than the evaluation documents. Traditional solutions rely on either translati
on to enable the use of single-language features, or language-independent feature extraction methods. More recently, transformer-based language models like BERT can also be pre-trained on multiple languages, making them intuitive candidates for cross-language classifiers which have not been used for this task yet. We perform extensive experiments to benchmark the performance of three different approaches to a smallscale cross-language authorship attribution experiment: (1) using language-independent features with traditional classification models, (2) using multilingual pre-trained language models, and (3) using machine translation to allow single-language classification. For the language-independent features, we utilize universal syntactic features like part-of-speech tags and dependency graphs, and multilingual BERT as a pre-trained language model. We use a small-scale social media comments dataset, closely reflecting practical scenarios. We show that applying machine translation drastically increases the performance of almost all approaches, and that the syntactic features in combination with the translation step achieve the best overall classification performance. In particular, we demonstrate that pre-trained language models are outperformed by traditional models in small scale authorship attribution problems for every language combination analyzed in this paper.
Mainstream research on hate speech focused so far predominantly on the task of classifying mainly social media posts with respect to predefined typologies of rather coarse-grained hate speech categories. This may be sufficient if the goal is to detec
t and delete abusive language posts. However, removal is not always possible due to the legislation of a country. Also, there is evidence that hate speech cannot be successfully combated by merely removing hate speech posts; they should be countered by education and counter-narratives. For this purpose, we need to identify (i) who is the target in a given hate speech post, and (ii) what aspects (or characteristics) of the target are attributed to the target in the post. As the first approximation, we propose to adapt a generic state-of-the-art concept extraction model to the hate speech domain. The outcome of the experiments is promising and can serve as inspiration for further work on the task
