João Sedoc

Also published as: Joao Sedoc


2022

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Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP
Shabnam Tafreshi | João Sedoc | Anna Rogers | Aleksandr Drozd | Anna Rumshisky | Arjun Akula
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP

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Clustering Examples in Multi-Dataset Benchmarks with Item Response Theory
Pedro Rodriguez | Phu Mon Htut | John Lalor | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP

In natural language processing, multi-dataset benchmarks for common tasks (e.g., SuperGLUE for natural language inference and MRQA for question answering) have risen in importance. Invariably, tasks and individual examples vary in difficulty. Recent analysis methods infer properties of examples such as difficulty. In particular, Item Response Theory (IRT) jointly infers example and model properties from the output of benchmark tasks (i.e., scores for each model-example pair). Therefore, it seems sensible that methods like IRT should be able to detect differences between datasets in a task. This work shows that current IRT models are not as good at identifying differences as we would expect, explain why this is difficult, and outline future directions that incorporate more (textual) signal from examples.

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Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis
Jeremy Barnes | Orphée De Clercq | Valentin Barriere | Shabnam Tafreshi | Sawsan Alqahtani | João Sedoc | Roman Klinger | Alexandra Balahur
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis

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WASSA 2022 Shared Task: Predicting Empathy, Emotion and Personality in Reaction to News Stories
Valentin Barriere | Shabnam Tafreshi | João Sedoc | Sawsan Alqahtani
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis

This paper presents the results that were obtained from WASSA 2022 shared task on predicting empathy, emotion, and personality in reaction to news stories. Participants were given access to a dataset comprising empathic reactions to news stories where harm is done to a person, group, or other. These reactions consist of essays and Batson’s empathic concern and personal distress scores. The dataset was further extended in WASSA 2021 shared task to include news articles, person-level demographic information (e.g. age, gender), personality information, and Ekman’s six basic emotions at essay level Participation was encouraged in four tracks: predicting empathy and distress scores, predicting emotion categories, predicting personality and predicting interpersonal reactivity. In total, 14 teams participated in the shared task. We summarize the methods and resources used by the participating teams.

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Gendered Language in Resumes and its Implications for Algorithmic Bias in Hiring
Prasanna Parasurama | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)

Despite growing concerns around gender bias in NLP models used in algorithmic hiring, there is little empirical work studying the extent and nature of gendered language in resumes.Using a corpus of 709k resumes from IT firms, we train a series of models to classify the gender of the applicant, thereby measuring the extent of gendered information encoded in resumes.We also investigate whether it is possible to obfuscate gender from resumes by removing gender identifiers, hobbies, gender sub-space in embedding models, etc.We find that there is a significant amount of gendered information in resumes even after obfuscation.A simple Tf-Idf model can learn to classify gender with AUROC=0.75, and more sophisticated transformer-based models achieve AUROC=0.8.We further find that gender predictive values have low correlation with gender direction of embeddings – meaning that, what is predictive of gender is much more than what is “gendered” in the masculine/feminine sense.We discuss the algorithmic bias and fairness implications of these findings in the hiring context.

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Measuring the Language of Self-Disclosure across Corpora
Ann-Katrin Reuel | Sebastian Peralta | João Sedoc | Garrick Sherman | Lyle Ungar
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Being able to reliably estimate self-disclosure – a key component of friendship and intimacy – from language is important for many psychology studies. We build single-task models on five self-disclosure corpora, but find that these models generalize poorly; the within-domain accuracy of predicted message-level self-disclosure of the best-performing model (mean Pearson’s r=0.69) is much higher than the respective across data set accuracy (mean Pearson’s r=0.32), due to both variations in the corpora (e.g., medical vs. general topics) and labeling instructions (target variables: self-disclosure, emotional disclosure, intimacy). However, some lexical features, such as expression of negative emotions and use of first person personal pronouns such as ‘I’ reliably predict self-disclosure across corpora. We develop a multi-task model that yields better results, with an average Pearson’s r of 0.37 for out-of-corpora prediction.

2021

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Measuring the ‘I don’t know’ Problem through the Lens of Gricean Quantity
Huda Khayrallah | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We consider the intrinsic evaluation of neural generative dialog models through the lens of Grice’s Maxims of Conversation (1975). Based on the maxim of Quantity (be informative), we propose Relative Utterance Quantity (RUQ) to diagnose the ‘I don’t know’ problem, in which a dialog system produces generic responses. The linguistically motivated RUQ diagnostic compares the model score of a generic response to that of the reference response. We find that for reasonable baseline models, ‘I don’t know’ is preferred over the reference the majority of the time, but this can be reduced to less than 5% with hyperparameter tuning. RUQ allows for the direct analysis of the ‘I don’t know’ problem, which has been addressed but not analyzed by prior work.

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The GEM Benchmark: Natural Language Generation, its Evaluation and Metrics
Sebastian Gehrmann | Tosin Adewumi | Karmanya Aggarwal | Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi | Anuoluwapo Aremu | Antoine Bosselut | Khyathi Raghavi Chandu | Miruna-Adriana Clinciu | Dipanjan Das | Kaustubh Dhole | Wanyu Du | Esin Durmus | Ondřej Dušek | Chris Chinenye Emezue | Varun Gangal | Cristina Garbacea | Tatsunori Hashimoto | Yufang Hou | Yacine Jernite | Harsh Jhamtani | Yangfeng Ji | Shailza Jolly | Mihir Kale | Dhruv Kumar | Faisal Ladhak | Aman Madaan | Mounica Maddela | Khyati Mahajan | Saad Mahamood | Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder | Pedro Henrique Martins | Angelina McMillan-Major | Simon Mille | Emiel van Miltenburg | Moin Nadeem | Shashi Narayan | Vitaly Nikolaev | Andre Niyongabo Rubungo | Salomey Osei | Ankur Parikh | Laura Perez-Beltrachini | Niranjan Ramesh Rao | Vikas Raunak | Juan Diego Rodriguez | Sashank Santhanam | João Sedoc | Thibault Sellam | Samira Shaikh | Anastasia Shimorina | Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo | Hendrik Strobelt | Nishant Subramani | Wei Xu | Diyi Yang | Akhila Yerukola | Jiawei Zhou
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM 2021)

We introduce GEM, a living benchmark for natural language Generation (NLG), its Evaluation, and Metrics. Measuring progress in NLG relies on a constantly evolving ecosystem of automated metrics, datasets, and human evaluation standards. Due to this moving target, new models often still evaluate on divergent anglo-centric corpora with well-established, but flawed, metrics. This disconnect makes it challenging to identify the limitations of current models and opportunities for progress. Addressing this limitation, GEM provides an environment in which models can easily be applied to a wide set of tasks and in which evaluation strategies can be tested. Regular updates to the benchmark will help NLG research become more multilingual and evolve the challenge alongside models. This paper serves as the description of the data for the 2021 shared task at the associated GEM Workshop.

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Decoding Methods for Neural Narrative Generation
Alexandra DeLucia | Aaron Mueller | Xiang Lisa Li | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM 2021)

Narrative generation is an open-ended NLP task in which a model generates a story given a prompt. The task is similar to neural response generation for chatbots; however, innovations in response generation are often not applied to narrative generation, despite the similarity between these tasks. We aim to bridge this gap by applying and evaluating advances in decoding methods for neural response generation to neural narrative generation. In particular, we employ GPT-2 and perform ablations across nucleus sampling thresholds and diverse decoding hyperparameters—specifically, maximum mutual information—analyzing results over multiple criteria with automatic and human evaluation. We find that (1) nucleus sampling is generally best with thresholds between 0.7 and 0.9; (2) a maximum mutual information objective can improve the quality of generated stories; and (3) established automatic metrics do not correlate well with human judgments of narrative quality on any qualitative metric.

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Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP
João Sedoc | Anna Rogers | Anna Rumshisky | Shabnam Tafreshi
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP

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Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis
Orphee De Clercq | Alexandra Balahur | Joao Sedoc | Valentin Barriere | Shabnam Tafreshi | Sven Buechel | Veronique Hoste
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

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WASSA 2021 Shared Task: Predicting Empathy and Emotion in Reaction to News Stories
Shabnam Tafreshi | Orphee De Clercq | Valentin Barriere | Sven Buechel | João Sedoc | Alexandra Balahur
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

This paper presents the results that were obtained from the WASSA 2021 shared task on predicting empathy and emotions. The participants were given access to a dataset comprising empathic reactions to news stories where harm is done to a person, group, or other. These reactions consist of essays, Batson empathic concern, and personal distress scores, and the dataset was further extended with news articles, person-level demographic information (age, gender, ethnicity, income, education level), and personality information. Additionally, emotion labels, namely Ekman’s six basic emotions, were added to the essays at both the document and sentence level. Participation was encouraged in two tracks: predicting empathy and predicting emotion categories. In total five teams participated in the shared task. We summarize the methods and resources used by the participating teams.

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Multi-Emotion Classification for Song Lyrics
Darren Edmonds | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

Song lyrics convey a multitude of emotions to the listener and powerfully portray the emotional state of the writer or singer. This paper examines a variety of modeling approaches to the multi-emotion classification problem for songs. We introduce the Edmonds Dance dataset, a novel emotion-annotated lyrics dataset from the reader’s perspective, and annotate the dataset of Mihalcea and Strapparava (2012) at the song level. We find that models trained on relatively small song datasets achieve marginally better performance than BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) fine-tuned on large social media or dialog datasets.

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Topic Modeling for Maternal Health Using Reddit
Shuang Gao | Shivani Pandya | Smisha Agarwal | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis

This paper applies topic modeling to understand maternal health topics, concerns, and questions expressed in online communities on social networking sites. We examine Latent Dirichlet Analysis (LDA) and two state-of-the-art methods: neural topic model with knowledge distillation (KD) and Embedded Topic Model (ETM) on maternal health texts collected from Reddit. The models are evaluated on topic quality and topic inference, using both auto-evaluation metrics and human assessment. We analyze a disconnect between automatic metrics and human evaluations. While LDA performs the best overall with the auto-evaluation metrics NPMI and Coherence, Neural Topic Model with Knowledge Distillation is favorable by expert evaluation. We also create a new partially expert annotated gold-standard maternal health topic

2020

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Collecting Verified COVID-19 Question Answer Pairs
Adam Poliak | Max Fleming | Cash Costello | Kenton Murray | Mahsa Yarmohammadi | Shivani Pandya | Darius Irani | Milind Agarwal | Udit Sharma | Shuo Sun | Nicola Ivanov | Lingxi Shang | Kaushik Srinivasan | Seolhwa Lee | Xu Han | Smisha Agarwal | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020

We release a dataset of over 2,100 COVID19 related Frequently asked Question-Answer pairs scraped from over 40 trusted websites. We include an additional 24, 000 questions pulled from online sources that have been aligned by experts with existing answered questions from our dataset. This paper describes our efforts in collecting the dataset and summarizes the resulting data. Our dataset is automatically updated daily and available at https://github.com/JHU-COVID-QA/ scraping-qas. So far, this data has been used to develop a chatbot providing users information about COVID-19. We encourage others to build analytics and tools upon this dataset as well.

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Using the Poly-encoder for a COVID-19 Question Answering System
Seolhwa Lee | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020

To combat misinformation regarding COVID- 19 during this unprecedented pandemic, we propose a conversational agent that answers questions related to COVID-19. We adapt the Poly-encoder (Humeau et al., 2020) model for informational retrieval from FAQs. We show that after fine-tuning, the Poly-encoder can achieve a higher F1 score. We make our code publicly available for other researchers to use.

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Learning Word Ratings for Empathy and Distress from Document-Level User Responses
João Sedoc | Sven Buechel | Yehonathan Nachmany | Anneke Buffone | Lyle Ungar
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Despite the excellent performance of black box approaches to modeling sentiment and emotion, lexica (sets of informative words and associated weights) that characterize different emotions are indispensable to the NLP community because they allow for interpretable and robust predictions. Emotion analysis of text is increasing in popularity in NLP; however, manually creating lexica for psychological constructs such as empathy has proven difficult. This paper automatically creates empathy word ratings from document-level ratings. The underlying problem of learning word ratings from higher-level supervision has to date only been addressed in an ad hoc fashion and has not used deep learning methods. We systematically compare a number of approaches to learning word ratings from higher-level supervision against a Mixed-Level Feed Forward Network (MLFFN), which we find performs best, and use the MLFFN to create the first-ever empathy lexicon. We then use Signed Spectral Clustering to gain insights into the resulting words. The empathy and distress lexica are publicly available at: http://www.wwbp.org/lexica.html.

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COD3S: Diverse Generation with Discrete Semantic Signatures
Nathaniel Weir | João Sedoc | Benjamin Van Durme
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We present COD3S, a novel method for generating semantically diverse sentences using neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models. Conditioned on an input, seq2seqs typically produce semantically and syntactically homogeneous sets of sentences and thus perform poorly on one-to-many sequence generation tasks. Our two-stage approach improves output diversity by conditioning generation on locality-sensitive hash (LSH)-based semantic sentence codes whose Hamming distances highly correlate with human judgments of semantic textual similarity. Though it is generally applicable, we apply to causal generation, the task of predicting a proposition’s plausible causes or effects. We demonstrate through automatic and human evaluation that responses produced using our method exhibit improved diversity without degrading task performance.

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Incremental Neural Coreference Resolution in Constant Memory
Patrick Xia | João Sedoc | Benjamin Van Durme
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We investigate modeling coreference resolution under a fixed memory constraint by extending an incremental clustering algorithm to utilize contextualized encoders and neural components. Given a new sentence, our end-to-end algorithm proposes and scores each mention span against explicit entity representations created from the earlier document context (if any). These spans are then used to update the entity’s representations before being forgotten; we only retain a fixed set of salient entities throughout the document. In this work, we successfully convert a high-performing model (Joshi et al., 2020), asymptotically reducing its memory usage to constant space with only a 0.3% relative loss in F1 on OntoNotes 5.0.

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Item Response Theory for Efficient Human Evaluation of Chatbots
João Sedoc | Lyle Ungar
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems

Conversational agent quality is currently assessed using human evaluation, and often requires an exorbitant number of comparisons to achieve statistical significance. In this paper, we introduce Item Response Theory (IRT) for chatbot evaluation, using a paired comparison in which annotators judge which system responds better to the next turn of a conversation. IRT is widely used in educational testing for simultaneously assessing the ability of test takers and the quality of test questions. It is similarly well suited for chatbot evaluation since it allows the assessment of both models and the prompts used to evaluate them. We use IRT to efficiently assess chatbots, and show that different examples from the evaluation set are better suited for comparing high-quality (nearer to human performance) than low-quality systems. Finally, we use IRT to reduce the number of evaluation examples assessed by human annotators while retaining discriminative power.

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SMRT Chatbots: Improving Non-Task-Oriented Dialog with Simulated Multiple Reference Training
Huda Khayrallah | João Sedoc
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Non-task-oriented dialog models suffer from poor quality and non-diverse responses. To overcome limited conversational data, we apply Simulated Multiple Reference Training (SMRT; Khayrallah et al., 2020), and use a paraphraser to simulate multiple responses per training prompt. We find SMRT improves over a strong Transformer baseline as measured by human and automatic quality scores and lexical diversity. We also find SMRT is comparable to pretraining in human evaluation quality, and outperforms pretraining on automatic quality and lexical diversity, without requiring related-domain dialog data.

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP
Anna Rogers | João Sedoc | Anna Rumshisky
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP

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Learning Emotion from 100 Observations: Unexpected Robustness of Deep Learning under Strong Data Limitations
Sven Buechel | João Sedoc | H. Andrew Schwartz | Lyle Ungar
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotion's in Social Media

One of the major downsides of Deep Learning is its supposed need for vast amounts of training data. As such, these techniques appear ill-suited for NLP areas where annotated data is limited, such as less-resourced languages or emotion analysis, with its many nuanced and hard-to-acquire annotation formats. We conduct a questionnaire study indicating that indeed the vast majority of researchers in emotion analysis deems neural models inferior to traditional machine learning when training data is limited. In stark contrast to those survey results, we provide empirical evidence for English, Polish, and Portuguese that commonly used neural architectures can be trained on surprisingly few observations, outperforming n-gram based ridge regression on only 100 data points. Our analysis suggests that high-quality, pre-trained word embeddings are a main factor for achieving those results.

2019

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Comparison of Diverse Decoding Methods from Conditional Language Models
Daphne Ippolito | Reno Kriz | João Sedoc | Maria Kustikova | Chris Callison-Burch
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

While conditional language models have greatly improved in their ability to output high quality natural language, many NLP applications benefit from being able to generate a diverse set of candidate sequences. Diverse decoding strategies aim to, within a given-sized candidate list, cover as much of the space of high-quality outputs as possible, leading to improvements for tasks that rerank and combine candidate outputs. Standard decoding methods, such as beam search, optimize for generating high likelihood sequences rather than diverse ones, though recent work has focused on increasing diversity in these methods. In this work, we perform an extensive survey of decoding-time strategies for generating diverse outputs from a conditional language model. In addition, we present a novel method where we over-sample candidates, then use clustering to remove similar sequences, thus achieving high diversity without sacrificing quality.

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Complexity-Weighted Loss and Diverse Reranking for Sentence Simplification
Reno Kriz | João Sedoc | Marianna Apidianaki | Carolina Zheng | Gaurav Kumar | Eleni Miltsakaki | Chris Callison-Burch
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Sentence simplification is the task of rewriting texts so they are easier to understand. Recent research has applied sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models to this task, focusing largely on training-time improvements via reinforcement learning and memory augmentation. One of the main problems with applying generic Seq2Seq models for simplification is that these models tend to copy directly from the original sentence, resulting in outputs that are relatively long and complex. We aim to alleviate this issue through the use of two main techniques. First, we incorporate content word complexities, as predicted with a leveled word complexity model, into our loss function during training. Second, we generate a large set of diverse candidate simplifications at test time, and rerank these to promote fluency, adequacy, and simplicity. Here, we measure simplicity through a novel sentence complexity model. These extensions allow our models to perform competitively with state-of-the-art systems while generating simpler sentences. We report standard automatic and human evaluation metrics.

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Continual Learning for Sentence Representations Using Conceptors
Tianlin Liu | Lyle Ungar | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Distributed representations of sentences have become ubiquitous in natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we consider a continual learning scenario for sentence representations: Given a sequence of corpora, we aim to optimize the sentence encoder with respect to the new corpus while maintaining its accuracy on the old corpora. To address this problem, we propose to initialize sentence encoders with the help of corpus-independent features, and then sequentially update sentence encoders using Boolean operations of conceptor matrices to learn corpus-dependent features. We evaluate our approach on semantic textual similarity tasks and show that our proposed sentence encoder can continually learn features from new corpora while retaining its competence on previously encountered corpora.

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ChatEval: A Tool for Chatbot Evaluation
João Sedoc | Daphne Ippolito | Arun Kirubarajan | Jai Thirani | Lyle Ungar | Chris Callison-Burch
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)

Open-domain dialog systems (i.e. chatbots) are difficult to evaluate. The current best practice for analyzing and comparing these dialog systems is the use of human judgments. However, the lack of standardization in evaluation procedures, and the fact that model parameters and code are rarely published hinder systematic human evaluation experiments. We introduce a unified framework for human evaluation of chatbots that augments existing tools and provides a web-based hub for researchers to share and compare their dialog systems. Researchers can submit their trained models to the ChatEval web interface and obtain comparisons with baselines and prior work. The evaluation code is open-source to ensure standardization and transparency. In addition, we introduce open-source baseline models and evaluation datasets. ChatEval can be found at https://chateval.org.

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Conceptor Debiasing of Word Representations Evaluated on WEAT
Saket Karve | Lyle Ungar | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing

Bias in word representations, such as Word2Vec, has been widely reported and investigated, and efforts made to debias them. We apply the debiasing conceptor for post-processing both traditional and contextualized word embeddings. Our method can simultaneously remove racial and gender biases from word representations. Unlike standard debiasing methods, the debiasing conceptor can utilize heterogeneous lists of biased words without loss in performance. Finally, our empirical experiments show that the debiasing conceptor diminishes racial and gender bias of word representations as measured using the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) of Caliskan et al. (2017).

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The Role of Protected Class Word Lists in Bias Identification of Contextualized Word Representations
João Sedoc | Lyle Ungar
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing

Systemic bias in word embeddings has been widely reported and studied, and efforts made to debias them; however, new contextualized embeddings such as ELMo and BERT are only now being similarly studied. Standard debiasing methods require heterogeneous lists of target words to identify the “bias subspace”. We show show that using new contextualized word embeddings in conceptor debiasing allows us to more accurately debias word embeddings by breaking target word lists into more homogeneous subsets and then combining (”Or’ing”) the debiasing conceptors of the different subsets.

2018

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Modeling Empathy and Distress in Reaction to News Stories
Sven Buechel | Anneke Buffone | Barry Slaff | Lyle Ungar | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Computational detection and understanding of empathy is an important factor in advancing human-computer interaction. Yet to date, text-based empathy prediction has the following major limitations: It underestimates the psychological complexity of the phenomenon, adheres to a weak notion of ground truth where empathic states are ascribed by third parties, and lacks a shared corpus. In contrast, this contribution presents the first publicly available gold standard for empathy prediction. It is constructed using a novel annotation methodology which reliably captures empathy assessments by the writer of a statement using multi-item scales. This is also the first computational work distinguishing between multiple forms of empathy, empathic concern, and personal distress, as recognized throughout psychology. Finally, we present experimental results for three different predictive models, of which a CNN performs the best.

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ChatEval: A Tool for the Systematic Evaluation of Chatbots
João Sedoc | Daphne Ippolito | Arun Kirubarajan | Jai Thirani | Lyle Ungar | Chris Callison-Burch
Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Interactive Systems and Language Generation (2IS&NLG)

2017

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Semantic Word Clusters Using Signed Spectral Clustering
João Sedoc | Jean Gallier | Dean Foster | Lyle Ungar
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Vector space representations of words capture many aspects of word similarity, but such methods tend to produce vector spaces in which antonyms (as well as synonyms) are close to each other. For spectral clustering using such word embeddings, words are points in a vector space where synonyms are linked with positive weights, while antonyms are linked with negative weights. We present a new signed spectral normalized graph cut algorithm, signed clustering, that overlays existing thesauri upon distributionally derived vector representations of words, so that antonym relationships between word pairs are represented by negative weights. Our signed clustering algorithm produces clusters of words that simultaneously capture distributional and synonym relations. By using randomized spectral decomposition (Halko et al., 2011) and sparse matrices, our method is both fast and scalable. We validate our clusters using datasets containing human judgments of word pair similarities and show the benefit of using our word clusters for sentiment prediction.

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Predicting Emotional Word Ratings using Distributional Representations and Signed Clustering
João Sedoc | Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro | Lyle Ungar
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

Inferring the emotional content of words is important for text-based sentiment analysis, dialogue systems and psycholinguistics, but word ratings are expensive to collect at scale and across languages or domains. We develop a method that automatically extends word-level ratings to unrated words using signed clustering of vector space word representations along with affect ratings. We use our method to determine a word’s valence and arousal, which determine its position on the circumplex model of affect, the most popular dimensional model of emotion. Our method achieves superior out-of-sample word rating prediction on both affective dimensions across three different languages when compared to state-of-the-art word similarity based methods. Our method can assist building word ratings for new languages and improve downstream tasks such as sentiment analysis and emotion detection.
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