MUSIED: A Benchmark for Event Detection from Multi-Source Heterogeneous Informal Texts

Event detection (ED) identifies and classifies event triggers from unstructured texts, serving as a fundamental task for information extraction. Despite the remarkable progress achieved in the past several years, most research efforts focus on detecting events from formal texts (e.g., news articles, Wikipedia documents, financial announcements). Moreover, the texts in each dataset are either from a single source or multiple yet relatively homogeneous sources. With massive amounts of user-generated text accumulating on the Web and inside enterprises, identifying meaningful events in these informal texts, usually from multiple heterogeneous sources, has become a problem of significant practical value. As a pioneering exploration that expands event detection to the scenarios involving informal and heterogeneous texts, we propose a new large-scale Chinese event detection dataset based on user reviews, text conversations, and phone conversations in a leading e-commerce platform for food service. We carefully investigate the proposed dataset's textual informality and multi-source heterogeneity characteristics by inspecting data samples quantitatively and qualitatively. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art event detection methods verify the unique challenges posed by these characteristics, indicating that multi-source informal event detection remains an open problem and requires further efforts. Our benchmark and code are released at \url{https://github.com/myeclipse/MUSIED}.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 202

Role of sentiment classification in sentiment analysis: a survey

Through a survey of literature, the role of sentiment classification in sentiment analysis has been reviewed. The review identifies the research challenges involved in tackling sentiment classification. A total of 68 articles during 2015 – 2017 have been reviewed on six dimensions viz., sentiment classification, feature extraction, cross-lingual sentiment classification, cross-domain sentiment classification, lexica and corpora creation and multi-label sentiment classification. This study discusses the prominence and effects of sentiment classification in sentiment evaluation and a lot of further research needs to be done for productive results

SWSR: A Chinese dataset and lexicon for online sexism detection

Online sexism has become an increasing concern in social media platforms as it has affected the healthy development of the Internet and can have negative effects in society. While research in the sexism detection domain is growing, most of this research focuses on English as the language and on Twitter as the platform. Our objective here is to broaden the scope of this research by considering the Chinese language on Sina Weibo. We propose the first Chinese sexism dataset – Sina Weibo Sexism Review (SWSR) dataset –, as well as a large Chinese lexicon SexHateLex made of abusive and gender-related terms. We introduce our data collection and annotation process, and provide an exploratory analysis of the dataset characteristics to validate its quality and to show how sexism is manifested in Chinese. The SWSR dataset provides labels at different levels of granularity including (i) sexism or non-sexism, (ii) sexism category and (iii) target type, which can be exploited, among others, for building computational methods to identify and investigate finer-grained gender-related abusive language. We conduct experiments for the three sexism classification tasks making use of state-of-the-art machine learning models. Our results show competitive performance, providing a benchmark for sexism detection in the Chinese language, as well as an error analysis highlighting open challenges needing more research in Chinese NLP. The SWSR dataset and SexHateLex lexicon are publicly available.

Detecting and Monitoring Hate Speech in Twitter

Social Media are sensors in the real world that can be used to measure the pulse of societies. However, the massive and unfiltered feed of messages posted in social media is a phenomenon that nowadays raises social alarms, especially when these messages contain hate speech targeted to a specific individual or group. In this context, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are concerned about the possible negative impact that these messages can have on individuals or on the society. In this paper, we present HaterNet, an intelligent system currently being used by the Spanish National Office Against Hate Crimes of the Spanish State Secretariat for Security that identifies and monitors the evolution of hate speech in Twitter. The contributions of this research are many-fold: (1) It introduces the first intelligent system that monitors and visualizes, using social network analysis techniques, hate speech in Social Media. (2) It introduces a novel public dataset on hate speech in Spanish consisting of 6000 expert-labeled tweets. (3) It compares several classification approaches based on different document representation strategies and text classification models. (4) The best approach consists of a combination of a LTSM+MLP neural network that takes as input the tweet’s word, emoji, and expression tokens’ embeddings enriched by the tf-idf, and obtains an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.828 on our dataset, outperforming previous methods presented in the literatureThe work by Quijano-Sanchez was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant FJCI-2016-28855. The research of Liberatore was supported by the Government of Spain, grant MTM2015-65803-R, and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 691161 (GEOSAFE). All the financial support is gratefully acknowledge

Revisiting the challenges and surveys in text similarity matching and detection methods

The massive amount of information from the internet has revolutionized the field of natural language processing. One of the challenges was estimating the similarity between texts. This has been an open research problem although various studies have proposed new methods over the years. This paper surveyed and traced the primary studies in the field of text similarity. The aim was to give a broad overview of existing issues, applications, and methods of text similarity research. This paper identified four issues and several applications of text similarity matching. It classified current studies based on intrinsic, extrinsic, and hybrid approaches. Then, we identified the methods and classified them into lexical-similarity, syntactic-similarity, semantic-similarity, structural-similarity, and hybrid. Furthermore, this study also analyzed and discussed method improvement, current limitations, and open challenges on this topic for future research directions