Sandeep Soni


2023

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Grounding Characters and Places in Narrative Text
Sandeep Soni | Amanpreet Sihra | Elizabeth Evans | Matthew Wilkens | David Bamman
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Tracking characters and locations throughout a story can help improve the understanding of its plot structure. Prior research has analyzed characters and locations from text independently without grounding characters to their locations in narrative time. Here, we address this gap by proposing a new spatial relationship categorization task. The objective of the task is to assign a spatial relationship category for every character and location co-mention within a window of text, taking into consideration linguistic context, narrative tense, and temporal scope. To this end, we annotate spatial relationships in approximately 2500 book excerpts and train a model using contextual embeddings as features to predict these relationships. When applied to a set of books, this model allows us to test several hypotheses on mobility and domestic space, revealing that protagonists are more mobile than non-central characters and that women as characters tend to occupy more interior space than men. Overall, our work is the first step towards joint modeling and analysis of characters and places in narrative text.

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Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4
Kent Chang | Mackenzie Cramer | Sandeep Soni | David Bamman
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this work, we carry out a data archaeology to infer books that are known to ChatGPT and GPT-4 using a name cloze membership inference query. We find that OpenAI models have memorized a wide collection of copyrighted materials, and that the degree of memorization is tied to the frequency with which passages of those books appear on the web. The ability of these models to memorize an unknown set of books complicates assessments of measurement validity for cultural analytics by contaminating test data; we show that models perform much better on memorized books than on non-memorized books for downstream tasks. We argue that this supports a case for open models whose training data is known.

2022

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Predicting Long-Term Citations from Short-Term Linguistic Influence
Sandeep Soni | David Bamman | Jacob Eisenstein
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

A standard measure of the influence of a research paper is the number of times it is cited. However, papers may be cited for many reasons, and citation count is not informative about the extent to which a paper affected the content of subsequent publications. We therefore propose a novel method to quantify linguistic influence in timestamped document collections. There are two main steps: first, identify lexical and semantic changes using contextual embeddings and word frequencies; second, aggregate information about these changes into per-document influence parameters by estimating a high-dimensional Hawkes process with a low-rank parameter matrix. The resulting measures of linguistic influence are predictive of future citations. Specifically, the estimate of linguistic influence from the two years after a paper’s publication is correlated with and predictive of its citation count in the following three years. This is demonstrated using an online evaluation with incremental temporal training/test splits, in comparison with a strong baseline that includes predictors for initial citation counts, topics, and lexical features.

2019

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Correcting Whitespace Errors in Digitized Historical Texts
Sandeep Soni | Lauren Klein | Jacob Eisenstein
Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

Whitespace errors are common to digitized archives. This paper describes a lightweight unsupervised technique for recovering the original whitespace. Our approach is based on count statistics from Google n-grams, which are converted into a likelihood ratio test computed from interpolated trigram and bigram probabilities. To evaluate this approach, we annotate a small corpus of whitespace errors in a digitized corpus of newspapers from the 19th century United States. Our technique identifies and corrects most whitespace errors while introducing a minimal amount of oversegmentation: it achieves 77% recall at a false positive rate of less than 1%, and 91% recall at a false positive rate of less than 3%.

2014

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Modeling Factuality Judgments in Social Media Text
Sandeep Soni | Tanushree Mitra | Eric Gilbert | Jacob Eisenstein
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)