Ireland

People associate affective meanings to words - &quot;death&quot; is scary and sad while &quot;party&quot; is connotated with surprise and joy. This raises the question if the association is purely a product of the learned affective imports inherent to semantic meanings, or is also an effect of other features of words, e.g., morphological and phonological patterns. We approach this question with an annotation-based analysis leveraging nonsense words. Specifically, we conduct a best-worst scaling crowdsourcing study in which participants assign intensity scores for joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise to 272 non-sense words and, for comparison of the results to previous work, to 68 real words. Based on this resource, we develop character-level and phonology-based intensity regressors. We evaluate them on both nonsense words and real words (making use of the NRC emotion intensity lexicon of 7493 words), across six emotion categories. The analysis of our data reveals that some phonetic patterns show clear differences between emotion intensities. For instance, s as a first phoneme contributes to joy, sh to surprise, p as last phoneme more to disgust than to anger and fear. In the modelling experiments, a regressor trained on real words from the NRC emotion intensity lexicon shows a higher performance (r = 0.17) than regressors that aim at learning the emotion connotation purely from nonsense words. We conclude that humans do associate affective meaning to words based on surface patterns, but also based on similarities to existing words (&quot;juy&quot; to &quot;joy&quot;, or &quot;flike&quot; to &quot;like&quot;).

ACL 2022

“splink” is happy and “phrouth” is scary: Emotion Intensity Analysis for Nonsense Words

sound meaning

nonsense words

emotion analysis

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

People associate affective meanings to words - "death" is scary and sad while "party" is connotated with surprise and joy. This raises the question if the association is purely a product of the learned affective imports inherent to semantic meanings, or is also an effect of other features of words, e.g., morphological and phonological patterns. We approach this question with an annotation-based analysis leveraging nonsense words. Specifically, we conduct a best-worst scaling crowdsourcing study in which participants assign intensity scores for joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise to 272 non-sense words and, for comparison of the results to previous work, to 68 real words. Based on this resource, we develop character-level and phonology-based intensity regressors. We evaluate them on both nonsense words and real words (making use of the NRC emotion intensity lexicon of 7493 words), across six emotion categories. The analysis of our data reveals that some phonetic patterns show clear differences between emotion intensities. For instance, s as a first phoneme contributes to joy, sh to surprise, p as last phoneme more to disgust than to anger and fear. In the modelling experiments, a regressor trained on real words from the NRC emotion intensity lexicon shows a higher performance (r = 0.17) than regressors that aim at learning the emotion connotation purely from nonsense words. We conclude that humans do associate affective meaning to words based on surface patterns, but also based on similarities to existing words ("juy" to "joy", or "flike" to "like").

workshop paper

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Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models have achieved acceptable performance in sentiment prediction of written text. However, the output of these machine learning (ML) models cannot be natively interpreted. In this paper, we study how the sentiment polarity predictions by DNNs can be explained and compare them to humans' explanations. We crowdsource a corpus of Personal Narratives and ask human judges to annotate them with polarity and select the corresponding token chunks - the Emotion Carriers (EC) - that convey narrators' emotions in the text. The interpretations of ML neural models are carried out through Integrated Gradients method and we compare them with human annotators' interpretations. The results of our comparative analysis indicate that while the ML model mostly focuses on the explicit appearance of emotions-laden words (e.g. happy, frustrated), the human annotator predominantly focuses the attention on the manifestation of emotions through ECs that denote events, persons, and objects which activate narrator's emotional state.

Can Emotion Carriers Explain Automatic Sentiment Prediction? A Study on Personal Narratives

Stance detection infers a text author's attitude towards a target. This is challenging when the model lacks background knowledge about the target. Here, we show how background knowledge from Wikipedia can help enhance the performance on stance detection. We introduce Wikipedia Stance Detection BERT (WS-BERT) that infuses the knowledge into stance encoding. Extensive results on three benchmark datasets covering social media discussions and online debates indicate that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on target-specific stance detection, cross-target stance detection, and zero/few-shot stance detection.

Infusing Knowledge from Wikipedia to Enhance Stance Detection

By sharing parameters and providing task-independent shared features, multi-task deep neural networks are considered one of the most interesting ways for parallel learning from different tasks and domains. However, fine-tuning on one task may compromise the performance of other tasks or restrict the generalization of the shared learned features. To address this issue, we propose to use task uncertainty to gauge the effect of the shared feature changes on other tasks and prevent the model from overfitting or over-generalizing. We conducted an experiment on 16 text classification tasks, and the findings showed that the proposed method consistently improves the performance of the baseline, facilitates the knowledge transfer of learned features to unseen data, and provides explicit control over the generalization of the shared model.

Uncertainty Regularized Multi-Task Learning

Recent works have demonstrated ability to assess aspects of mental health from personal discourse. At the same time, pre-trained contextual word embedding models have grown to dominate much of NLP but little is known empirically on how to best apply them for mental health assessment. Using degree of depression as a case study, we do an empirical analysis on which off-the-shelf language model, individual layers, and combinations of layers seem most promising when applied to human-level NLP tasks. Notably, we find RoBERTa most effective and, despite the standard in past work suggesting the second-to-last or concatenation of the last 4 layers, we find layer 19 (sixth-to last) is at least as good as layer 23 when using 1 layer. Further, when using multiple layers, distributing them across the second half (i.e. Layers 12+), rather than last 4, of the 24 layers yielded the most accurate results.

Understanding BERT's Mood: The Role of Contextual-Embeddings as User-Representations for Depression Assessment

Public opinion in social media is increasingly becoming a critical factor in pandemic control. Understanding the emotions of a population towards vaccinations and COVID-19 may be valuable in convincing members to become vaccinated. We investigated the emotions of Japanese Twitter users towards Tweets related to COVID-19 vaccination. Using the WRIME dataset, which provides emotion ratings for Japanese Tweets sourced from writers (Tweet posters) and readers, we fine-tuned a BERT model to predict levels of emotional intensity. This model achieved a training accuracy of MSE = 0.356. A separate dataset of 20,254 Japanese Tweets containing COVID-19 vaccine-related keywords was also collected, on which the fine-tuned BERT was used to perform emotion analysis. Afterwards, a correlation analysis between the extracted emotions and a set of vaccination measures in Japan was conducted. The results revealed that surprise and fear were the most intense emotions predicted by the model for writers and readers, respectively, on the vaccine-related Tweet dataset. The correlation analysis also showed that vaccinations were weakly positively correlated with predicted levels of writer joy, writer/reader anticipation, and writer/reader trust. Code will be made available at https: //github.com/PatrickJohnRamos/BERT-Japan-vaccination.

Emotion Analysis of Writers and Readers of Japanese Tweets on Vaccinations

Domain adaptation methods often exploit domain-transferable input features, a.k.a. pivots. The task of Aspect and Opinion Term Extraction presents a special challenge for domain transfer: while opinion terms largely transfer across domains, aspects change drastically from one domain to another (e.g. from restaurants to laptops). In this paper, we investigate and establish empirically a prior conjecture, which suggests that the linguistic relations connecting opinion terms to their aspects transfer well across domains and therefore can be leveraged for cross-domain aspect term extraction. We present several analyses supporting this conjecture, via experiments with four linguistic dependency formalisms to represent relation patterns. Subsequently, we present an aspect term extraction method that drives models to consider opinion–aspect relations via explicit multitask objectives. This method provides significant performance gains, even on top of a prior state-of-the-art linguistically-informed model, which are shown in analysis to stem from the relational pivoting signal.

Opinion-based Relational Pivoting for Cross-domain Aspect Term Extraction

Models are increasing in size and complexity in the hunt for SOTA. But what if those 2% increase in performance does not make a difference in a production use case? Maybe benefits from a smaller, faster model outweigh those slight performance gains. Also, equally good performance across languages in multilingual tasks is more important than SOTA results on a single one. We present the biggest, unified, multilingual collection of sentiment analysis datasets. We use these to assess 11 models and 80 high-quality sentiment datasets (out of 342 raw datasets collected) in 27 languages and included results on the internally annotated datasets. We deeply evaluate multiple setups, including fine-tuning transformer-based models for measuring performance. We compare results in numerous dimensions addressing the imbalance in both languages coverage and dataset sizes. Finally, we present some best practices for working with such a massive collection of datasets and models from a multilingual perspective.

Assessment of Massively Multilingual Sentiment Classifiers

Masked language models (MLMs) are pre-trained with a denoising objective that is in a mismatch with the objective of downstream fine-tuning. We propose pragmatic masking and surrogate fine-tuning as two complementing strategies that exploit social cues to drive pre-trained representations toward a broad set of concepts useful for a wide class of social meaning tasks. We test our models on 15 different Twitter datasets for social meaning detection. Our methods achieve 2.34% F1 over a competitive baseline, while outperforming domain-specific language models pre-trained on large datasets. Our methods also excel in few-shot learning: with only 5% of training data (severely few-shot), our methods enable an impressive 68.54% average F1. The methods are also language agnostic, as we show in a zero-shot setting involving six datasets from three different languages.

Improving Social Meaning Detection with Pragmatic Masking and Surrogate Fine-Tuning

Over the years, the review helpfulness prediction task has been the subject of several works, but remains being a challenging issue in Natural Language Processing, as results vary a lot depending on the domain, on the adopted features and on the chosen classification strategy. This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of
content features and classification methods for two different domains. In particular, we run our experiments for a low resource language – Portuguese –, trying to establish a benchmark for this language. We show that simple features and classical classification methods are powerful for the task of helpfulness prediction, but are largely outperformed by a convolutional neural network-based solution.


Evaluating Content Features and Classification Methods for Helpfulness Prediction of Online Reviews: Establishing a Benchmark for Portuguese

Our system, IUCL, participated in the WASSA 2022 Shared Task on Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification. Our main goal in building this system is to investigate how the use of demographic attributes influences performance. Our (official) results show that our text-only systems perform very competitively, ranking first in the empathy detection task, reaching an average Pearson correlation of 0.54, and second in the emotion classification task, reaching a Macro-F of 0.572. Our systems that use both text and demographic data are less competitive.

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