Online petitions are a cost-effective way for citizens to collectively engage with policy-makers in a democracy. Predicting the popularity of a petition --- commonly measured by its signature count --- based on its textual content has utility for policy-makers as well as those posting the petition. In this work, we model this task using CNN regression with an auxiliary ordinal regression objective. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach using UK and US government petition datasets.
We present a method for accurately predicting the long time popularity of online content from early measurements of user access. Using two content sharing portals, Youtube and Digg, we show that by modeling the accrual of views and votes on content offered by these services we can predict the long-term dynamics of individual submissions from initial data. In the case of Digg, measuring access to given stories during the first two hours allows us to forecast their popularity 30 days ahead with remarkable accuracy, while downloads of Youtube videos need to be followed for 10 days to attain the same performance. The differing time scales of the predictions are shown to be due to differences in how content is consumed on the two portals: Digg stories quickly become outdated, while Youtube videos are still found long after they are initially submitted to the portal. We show that predictions are more accurate for submissions for which attention decays quickly, whereas predictions for evergreen content will be prone to larger errors.
Many pledges are made in the course of an election campaign, forming important corpora for political analysis of campaign strategy and governmental accountability. At present, there are no publicly available annotated datasets of pledges, and most political analyses rely on manual analysis. In this paper we collate a novel dataset of manifestos from eleven Australian federal election cycles, with over 12,000 sentences annotated with specificity (e.g., rhetorical vs. detailed pledge) on a fine-grained scale. We propose deep ordinal regression approaches for specificity prediction, under both supervised and semi-supervised settings, and provide empirical results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed techniques over several baseline approaches. We analyze the utility of pledge specificity modeling across a spectrum of policy issues in performing ideology prediction, and further provide qualitative analysis in terms of capturing party-specific issue salience across election cycles.
Generating high quality uncertainty estimates for sequential regression, particularly deep recurrent networks, remains a challenging and open problem. Existing approaches often make restrictive assumptions (such as stationarity) yet still perform poorly in practice, particularly in presence of real world non-stationary signals and drift. This paper describes a flexible method that can generate symmetric and asymmetric uncertainty estimates, makes no assumptions about stationarity, and outperforms competitive baselines on both drift and non drift scenarios. This work helps make sequential regression more effective and practical for use in real-world applications, and is a powerful new addition to the modeling toolbox for sequential uncertainty quantification in general.
This paper presents the participation of the MiniTrue team in the EXIST 2021 Challenge on the sexism detection in social media task for English and Spanish. Our approach combines the language models with a simple voting mechanism for the sexist label prediction. For this, three BERT based models and a voting function are used. Experimental results show that our final model with the voting function has achieved the best results among our four models, which means that our voting mechanism brings an extra benefit to our system. Nevertheless, we also observe that our system is robust to data sources and languages.
In this paper, we adapt triplet neural networks (TNNs) to a regression task, music emotion prediction. Since TNNs were initially introduced for classification, and not for regression, we propose a mechanism that allows them to provide meaningful low dimensional representations for regression tasks. We then use these new representations as the input for regression algorithms such as support vector machines and gradient boosting machines. To demonstrate the TNNs effectiveness at creating meaningful representations, we compare them to different dimensionality reduction methods on music emotion prediction, i.e., predicting valence and arousal values from musical audio signals. Our results on the DEAM dataset show that by using TNNs we achieve 90% feature dimensionality reduction with a 9% improvement in valence prediction and 4% improvement in arousal prediction with respect to our baseline models (without TNN). Our TNN method outperforms other dimensionality reduction methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) and autoencoders (AE). This shows that, in addition to providing a compact latent space representation of audio features, the proposed approach has a higher performance than the baseline models.