Spain

Downstream effects of biased training data have become a major concern of the NLP community. How this may impact the automated curation and annotation of cultural heritage material is currently not well known. In this work, we create an experimental framework to measure the effects of different types of stylistic and social bias within training data for the purposes of literary classification, as one important subclass of cultural material. Because historical collections are often sparsely annotated, much like our knowledge of history is incomplete, researchers often cannot know the underlying distributions of different document types and their various sub-classes. This means that bias is likely to be an intrinsic feature of training data when it comes to cultural heritage material. Our aim in this study is to investigate which classification methods may help mitigate the effects of different types of bias within curated samples of training data. We find that machine learning techniques such as BERT or SVM are robust against reproducing certain kinds of social and stylistic bias within our test data, except in the most extreme cases. We hope that this work will spur further research into the potential effects of bias within training data for other cultural heritage material beyond the study of literature.

COLING 2020

Measuring the Effects of Bias in Training Data for Literary Classification

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of correcting different types of errors in written texts. To manage this task, large amounts of annotated data that contain erroneous sentences are required. This data, however, is usually annotated according to each annotator’s standards, making it difficult to manage multiple sets of data at the same time. The recently introduced Error Annotation Toolkit (ERRANT) tackled this problem by presenting a way to automatically annotate data that contain grammatical errors, while also providing a standardisation for annotation. ERRANT extracts the errors and classifies them into error types, in the form of an edit that can be used in the creation of GEC systems, as well as for grammatical error analysis. However, we observe that certain errors are falsely or ambiguously classified. This could obstruct any qualitative or quantitative grammatical error type analysis, as the results would be inaccurate. In this work, we use a sample of the FCE coprus (Yannakoudakis et al., 2011) for secondary error type annotation and we show that up to 39% of the annotations of the most frequent type should be re-classified. Our corrections will be publicly released, so that they can serve as the starting point of a broader, collaborative, ongoing correction process.

ERRANT: Assessing and Improving Grammatical Error Type
Classification

An increasing amount of historic data is now available in digital (text) formats.
This gives quantitative researchers an opportunity to use distant reading techniques, as opposed to traditional close reading, in order to analyse larger quantities of historic data. Distant reading allows researchers to view overall patterns within the data and reduce researcher bias. One such data set that has recently been transcribed is a collection of over 500 Australian World War I (WW1) diaries held by the State Library of New South Wales. Here we apply distant reading techniques to this corpus to understand what soldiers wrote about and how they felt over the course of the war. Extracting dates accurately is important as it allows us to perform our analysis over time, however, it is very challenging due to the variety of date formats and abbreviations diarists use. But with that data, topic modelling and sentiment analysis can then be applied to show trends, for instance, that despite the horrors of war, Australians in WW1 primarily wrote about their everyday routines and experiences. Our results detail some of the challenges likely to be encountered by quantitative researchers intending to analyse historical texts, and provide some approaches to these issues.

Life still goes on: Analysing Australian WW1 Diaries through Distant Reading

Creating a story is difficult. Professional writers often experience a writer's block. Thus, providing automatic support to writers is crucial but also challenging. Recently, in the field of generating and understanding stories, story completion (SC) has been proposed as a method for generating missing parts of an incomplete story. Despite this method's usefulness in providing creative support, its applicability is currently limited because it requires the user to have prior knowledge of the missing part of a story. Writers do not always know which part of their writing is flawed. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel approach called “missing position prediction (MPP).” Given an incomplete story, we aim to predict the position of the missing part. We also propose a novel method for MPP and SC. We first conduct an experiment focusing on MPP, and our analysis shows that highly accurate predictions can be obtained when the missing part of a story is the beginning or the end. This suggests that if a story has a specific beginning or end, they play significant roles. We conduct an experiment on SC using MPP, and our proposed method demonstrates promising results.

Finding and Generating a Missing Part for Story Completion

Previous approaches to NLP tasks on online patient forums have been limited to single posts as units, thereby neglecting the overarching conversational structure. In this paper we explore the benefit of exploiting conversational context for filtering posts relevant to a specific medical topic. We experiment with two approaches to add conversational context to a BERT model: a sequential CRF layer and manually engineered features. Although neither approach can outperform the F1 score of the BERT baseline, we find that adding a sequential layer improves precision for all target classes whereas adding a non-sequential layer with manually engineered features leads to a higher recall for two out of three target classes. Thus, depending on the end goal, conversation-aware modelling may be beneficial for identifying relevant messages. We hope our findings encourage other researchers in this domain to move beyond studying messages in isolation towards more discourse-based data collection and classification.

Conversation-aware Filtering of Online Patient Forum Messages

The content I introduce is the winning system solution of TASK5 of SMM4H 2020. I will introduce the problems I have encountered and the solutions.

SMM4H 2020 Task5 1st Solution Sharing

Identifying patient information needs is an important issue for health care services and implementation of patient-centered care. A relevant number of people with diabetes mellitus experience a need for information during the course of the disease. Health-related online forums are a promising option for researching relevant information needs closely related to everyday life. In this paper, we present a novel data corpus comprising 4,664 contributions from an online diabetes forum in German language. Two annotation tasks were implemented. First, the contributions were categorised according to whether they contain a diabetes-specific information need or not, which might either be a non diabetes-specific information need or no information need at all, resulting in an agreement of 0.89 (Krippendorff’s α). Moreover, the textual content of diabetes-specific information needs was segmented and labeled using a well-founded definition of health-related information needs, which achieved a promising agreement of 0.82 (Krippendorff’s αu ). We further report a baseline for two sub-tasks of the information extraction system planned for the long term: contribution categorization and segment classification.

Annotating Patient Information Needs in Online Diabetes Forums

This presentation describes our winning system of SMM4H 2020 Task 1. This task challenged participants to detect tweets that mention medications or dietary supplements in a natural, highly imbalanced dataset. Our system combined a rule-based preprocessing step with a BERT-based ensemble classifier. Our system obtained F1 score at 85.35% and improved the average F1 score across all participating team by 19.07%.

Ensemble BERT for Classifying Medication-mentioning Tweets

Depression and anxiety are psychiatric disorders that are observed in many areas of everyday life. For example, these disorders manifest themselves somewhat frequently in texts written by nondiagnosed users in social media. However, detecting users with these conditions is not a straightforward task as they may not explicitly talk about their mental state, and if they do, contextual cues such as immediacy must be taken into account. When available, linguistic flags pointing to probable anxiety or depression could be used by medical experts to write better guidelines and treatments. In this paper, we develop a dataset designed to foster research in depression and anxiety detection in Twitter, framing the detection task as a binary tweet classification problem. We then apply state-of-the-art classification models to this dataset, providing a competitive set of baselines alongside qualitative error analysis. Our results show that language models perform reasonably well, and better than more traditional baselines. Nonetheless, there is clear room for improvement, particularly with unbalanced training sets and in cases where seemingly obvious linguistic cues (keywords) are used counter-intuitively.

Towards Preemptive Detection of Depression and Anxiety in Twitter

We present a study employing various techniques of text mining to explore and compare two different online forums focusing on depression: (1) the subreddit r/depression (over 60 million tokens), a large, open social media platform and (2) Beyond Blue (almost 5 million tokens), a professionally curated and moderated depression forum from Australia. We are interested in how the language and the content on these platforms differ from each other. We scrape both forums for a specific period. Next to general methods of computational text analysis, we focus on sentiment analysis, topic modeling and the distribution of word categories to analyze these forums. Our results indicate that Beyond Blue is generally more positive and that the users are more supportive to each other. Topic modeling shows that Beyond Blue’s users talk more about adult topics like finance and work while topics shaped by school or college terms are more prevalent on r/depression. Based on our findings we hypothesize that the professional curation and moderation of a depression forum is beneficial for the discussion in it.

Exploring Online Depression Forums via Text Mining: A Comparison of Reddit and a Curated Online Forum

In this paper, we described our systems for the first and second subtasks of Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task in 2020. The two subtasks are automatic classi-fication of medication mentions and adverse effect in tweets. Our systems for both subtasks are based on Robustly optimized BERT approach (RoBERTa) and our previous work at SMM4H’19. The best F1-scores achieved by our systems for subtask 1 and 2 were 0.7974 and 0.64 respec-tively, which outperformed the average F1-scores among all teams’ best runs by at least 0.13.

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