WhatsApp Messenger is one of the most popular channels for spreading information with a current reach of more than 180 countries and 2 billion people. Its widespread usage has made it one of the most popular media for information propagation among th
e masses during any socially engaging event. In the recent past, several countries have witnessed its effectiveness and influence in political and social campaigns. We observe a high surge in information and propaganda flow during election campaigning. In this paper, we explore a high-quality large-scale user-generated dataset curated from WhatsApp comprising of 281 groups, 31,078 unique users, and 223,404 messages shared before, during, and after the Indian General Elections 2019, encompassing all major Indian political parties and leaders. In addition to the raw noisy user-generated data, we present a fine-grained annotated dataset of 3,848 messages that will be useful to understand the various dimensions of WhatsApp political campaigning. We present several complementary insights into the investigative and sensational news stories from the same period. Exploratory data analysis and experiments showcase several exciting results and future research opportunities. To facilitate reproducible research, we make the anonymized datasets available in the public domain.
Large language models have led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks, and researchers are turning to ever-larger text corpora to train them. Some of the largest corpora available are made by scraping significant portions of the internet, and are f
requently introduced with only minimal documentation. In this work we provide some of the first documentation for the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4; Raffel et al., 2020), a dataset created by applying a set of filters to a single snapshot of Common Crawl. We begin by investigating where the data came from, and find a significant amount of text from unexpected sources like patents and US military websites. Then we explore the content of the text itself, and find machine-generated text (e.g., from machine translation systems) and evaluation examples from other benchmark NLP datasets. To understand the impact of the filters applied to create this dataset, we evaluate the text that was removed, and show that blocklist filtering disproportionately removes text from and about minority individuals. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for how to created and document web-scale datasets from a scrape of the internet.
Recently, the Machine Translation (MT) community has become more interested in document-level evaluation especially in light of reactions to claims of human parity'', since examining the quality at the level of the document rather than at the sentenc
e level allows for the assessment of suprasentential context, providing a more reliable evaluation. This paper presents a document-level corpus annotated in English with context-aware issues that arise when translating from English into Brazilian Portuguese, namely ellipsis, gender, lexical ambiguity, number, reference, and terminology, with six different domains. The corpus can be used as a challenge test set for evaluation and as a training/testing corpus for MT as well as for deep linguistic analysis of context issues. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first corpus of its kind.
We create a large-scale dialogue corpus that provides pragmatic paraphrases to advance technology for understanding the underlying intentions of users. While neural conversation models acquire the ability to generate fluent responses through training
on a dialogue corpus, previous corpora have mainly focused on the literal meanings of utterances. However, in reality, people do not always present their intentions directly. For example, if a person said to the operator of a reservation service I don't have enough budget.'', they, in fact, mean please find a cheaper option for me.'' Our corpus provides a total of 71,498 indirect--direct utterance pairs accompanied by a multi-turn dialogue history extracted from the MultiWoZ dataset. In addition, we propose three tasks to benchmark the ability of models to recognize and generate indirect and direct utterances. We also investigated the performance of state-of-the-art pre-trained models as baselines.
We consider the hierarchical representation of documents as graphs and use geometric deep learning to classify them into different categories. While graph neural networks can efficiently handle the variable structure of hierarchical documents using t
he permutation invariant message passing operations, we show that we can gain extra performance improvements using our proposed selective graph pooling operation that arises from the fact that some parts of the hierarchy are invariable across different documents. We applied our model to classify clinical trial (CT) protocols into completed and terminated categories. We use bag-of-words based, as well as pre-trained transformer-based embeddings to featurize the graph nodes, achieving f1-scoresaround 0.85 on a publicly available large scale CT registry of around 360K protocols. We further demonstrate how the selective pooling can add insights into the CT termination status prediction. We make the source code and dataset splits accessible.
With the essays part from The International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) and the TOEFL11 corpus, we fine-tuned neural language models based on BERT to predict English learners' native languages. Results showed neural models ca
n learn to represent and detect such native language impacts, but multilingually trained models have no advantage in doing so.
In this paper, we provide a bilingual parallel human-to-human recommendation dialog dataset (DuRecDial 2.0) to enable researchers to explore a challenging task of multilingual and cross-lingual conversational recommendation. The difference between Du
RecDial 2.0 and existing conversational recommendation datasets is that the data item (Profile, Goal, Knowledge, Context, Response) in DuRecDial 2.0 is annotated in two languages, both English and Chinese, while other datasets are built with the setting of a single language. We collect 8.2k dialogs aligned across English and Chinese languages (16.5k dialogs and 255k utterances in total) that are annotated by crowdsourced workers with strict quality control procedure. We then build monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual conversational recommendation baselines on DuRecDial 2.0. Experiment results show that the use of additional English data can bring performance improvement for Chinese conversational recommendation, indicating the benefits of DuRecDial 2.0. Finally, this dataset provides a challenging testbed for future studies of monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual conversational recommendation.
The development of automated approaches to linguistic acceptability has been greatly fostered by the availability of the English CoLA corpus, which has also been included in the widely used GLUE benchmark. However, this kind of research for languages
other than English, as well as the analysis of cross-lingual approaches, has been hindered by the lack of resources with a comparable size in other languages. We have therefore developed the ItaCoLA corpus, containing almost 10,000 sentences with acceptability judgments, which has been created following the same approach and the same steps as the English one. In this paper we describe the corpus creation, we detail its content, and we present the first experiments on this new resource. We compare in-domain and out-of-domain classification, and perform a specific evaluation of nine linguistic phenomena. We also present the first cross-lingual experiments, aimed at assessing whether multilingual transformer-based approaches can benefit from using sentences in two languages during fine-tuning.
Coordination is a phenomenon of language that conjoins two or more terms or phrases using a coordinating conjunction. Although coordination has been explored extensively in the linguistics literature, the rules and constraints that govern its structu
re are still largely elusive and widely debated amongst linguists. This paper presents a study of two-termed unlike coordinations in particular, where the two conjuncts of the coordination phrase form valid constituents but have distinct categories. We conducted a syntactic analysis of the phrasal categories that can be conjoined in such unlike coordinations through a computational corpus-based approach, utilizing the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as the main data source, as well as the Penn Treebank (PTB). The results show that the two conjuncts within unlike coordinations display different properties based on their position, supporting an antisymmetric view of the structure of coordination. This research provides new data and perspectives through the use of statistical techniques that can help shape future theories and models of coordination.
Language models pretrained on vast corpora of unstructured text using self-supervised learning framework are used in numerous natural language understanding and generation tasks. Many studies show that language acquisition in humans follows a rather
structured simple-to-complex pattern and guided by this intuition, curriculum learning, which enables training of computational models in a meaningful order, such as processing easy samples before hard ones, has been shown to potentially reduce training time. The question remains whether curriculum learning can benefit pretraining of language models. In this work, we perform comprehensive experiments involving multiple curricula strategies varying the criteria for complexity and the training schedules. Empirical results of training transformer language models on English corpus and evaluating it intrinsically as well as after fine-tuning across eight tasks from the GLUE benchmark, show consistent improvement gains over conventional vanilla training. Interestingly, in our experiments, when evaluated on one epoch, the best model following a document-level hard-to-easy curriculum, outperforms the vanilla model by 1.7 points (average GLUE score) and it takes the vanilla model twice as many training steps to reach comparable performance.
