Sophia Chan


2018

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Social and Emotional Correlates of Capitalization on Twitter
Sophia Chan | Alona Fyshe
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Modeling of People’s Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media

Social media text is replete with unusual capitalization patterns. We posit that capitalizing a token like THIS performs two expressive functions: it marks a person socially, and marks certain parts of an utterance as more salient than others. Focusing on gender and sentiment, we illustrate using a corpus of tweets that capitalization appears in more negative than positive contexts, and is used more by females compared to males. Yet we find that both genders use capitalization in a similar way when expressing sentiment.

2017

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Ensemble Methods for Native Language Identification
Sophia Chan | Maryam Honari Jahromi | Benjamin Benetti | Aazim Lakhani | Alona Fyshe
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

Our team—Uvic-NLP—explored and evaluated a variety of lexical features for Native Language Identification (NLI) within the framework of ensemble methods. Using a subset of the highest performing features, we train Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Fully Connected Neural Networks (FCNN) as base classifiers, and test different methods for combining their outputs. Restricting our scope to the closed essay track in the NLI Shared Task 2017, we find that our best SVM ensemble achieves an F1 score of 0.8730 on the test set.