27,567 research outputs found
Connotation Frames: A Data-Driven Investigation
Through a particular choice of a predicate (e.g., "x violated y"), a writer
can subtly connote a range of implied sentiments and presupposed facts about
the entities x and y: (1) writer's perspective: projecting x as an
"antagonist"and y as a "victim", (2) entities' perspective: y probably dislikes
x, (3) effect: something bad happened to y, (4) value: y is something valuable,
and (5) mental state: y is distressed by the event. We introduce connotation
frames as a representation formalism to organize these rich dimensions of
connotation using typed relations. First, we investigate the feasibility of
obtaining connotative labels through crowdsourcing experiments. We then present
models for predicting the connotation frames of verb predicates based on their
distributional word representations and the interplay between different types
of connotative relations. Empirical results confirm that connotation frames can
be induced from various data sources that reflect how people use language and
give rise to the connotative meanings. We conclude with analytical results that
show the potential use of connotation frames for analyzing subtle biases in
online news media.Comment: 11 pages, published in Proceedings of ACL 201
Deep Memory Networks for Attitude Identification
We consider the task of identifying attitudes towards a given set of entities
from text. Conventionally, this task is decomposed into two separate subtasks:
target detection that identifies whether each entity is mentioned in the text,
either explicitly or implicitly, and polarity classification that classifies
the exact sentiment towards an identified entity (the target) into positive,
negative, or neutral.
Instead, we show that attitude identification can be solved with an
end-to-end machine learning architecture, in which the two subtasks are
interleaved by a deep memory network. In this way, signals produced in target
detection provide clues for polarity classification, and reversely, the
predicted polarity provides feedback to the identification of targets.
Moreover, the treatments for the set of targets also influence each other --
the learned representations may share the same semantics for some targets but
vary for others. The proposed deep memory network, the AttNet, outperforms
methods that do not consider the interactions between the subtasks or those
among the targets, including conventional machine learning methods and the
state-of-the-art deep learning models.Comment: Accepted to WSDM'1
Viewpoint Discovery and Understanding in Social Networks
The Web has evolved to a dominant platform where everyone has the opportunity
to express their opinions, to interact with other users, and to debate on
emerging events happening around the world. On the one hand, this has enabled
the presence of different viewpoints and opinions about a - usually
controversial - topic (like Brexit), but at the same time, it has led to
phenomena like media bias, echo chambers and filter bubbles, where users are
exposed to only one point of view on the same topic. Therefore, there is the
need for methods that are able to detect and explain the different viewpoints.
In this paper, we propose a graph partitioning method that exploits social
interactions to enable the discovery of different communities (representing
different viewpoints) discussing about a controversial topic in a social
network like Twitter. To explain the discovered viewpoints, we describe a
method, called Iterative Rank Difference (IRD), which allows detecting
descriptive terms that characterize the different viewpoints as well as
understanding how a specific term is related to a viewpoint (by detecting other
related descriptive terms). The results of an experimental evaluation showed
that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on viewpoint discovery,
while a qualitative analysis of the proposed IRD method on three different
controversial topics showed that IRD provides comprehensive and deep
representations of the different viewpoints
A Hybrid Approach to Domain-Specific Entity Linking
The current state-of-the-art Entity Linking (EL) systems are geared towards
corpora that are as heterogeneous as the Web, and therefore perform
sub-optimally on domain-specific corpora. A key open problem is how to
construct effective EL systems for specific domains, as knowledge of the local
context should in principle increase, rather than decrease, effectiveness. In
this paper we propose the hybrid use of simple specialist linkers in
combination with an existing generalist system to address this problem. Our
main findings are the following. First, we construct a new reusable benchmark
for EL on a corpus of domain-specific conversations. Second, we test the
performance of a range of approaches under the same conditions, and show that
specialist linkers obtain high precision in isolation, and high recall when
combined with generalist linkers. Hence, we can effectively exploit local
context and get the best of both worlds.Comment: SEM'1
Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social
nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational
linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article
we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics"
that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the
relation between language and social identity, language use in social
interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the
potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how
the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement
existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and
challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey
the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and
conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication:
18th February, 201
- …