Jackson Sargent


2023

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Your spouse needs professional help: Determining the Contextual Appropriateness of Messages through Modeling Social Relationships
David Jurgens | Agrima Seth | Jackson Sargent | Athena Aghighi | Michael Geraci
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Understanding interpersonal communication requires, in part, understanding the social context and norms in which a message is said. However, current methods for identifying offensive content in such communication largely operate independent of context, with only a few approaches considering community norms or prior conversation as context. Here, we introduce a new approach to identifying inappropriate communication by explicitly modeling the social relationship between the individuals. We introduce a new dataset of contextually-situated judgments of appropriateness and show that large language models can readily incorporate relationship information to accurately identify appropriateness in a given context. Using data from online conversations and movie dialogues, we provide insight into how the relationships themselves function as implicit norms and quantify the degree to which context-sensitivity is needed in different conversation settings. Further, we also demonstrate that contextual-appropriateness judgments are predictive of other social factors expressed in language such as condescension and politeness.

2022

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POTATO: The Portable Text Annotation Tool
Jiaxin Pei | Aparna Ananthasubramaniam | Xingyao Wang | Naitian Zhou | Apostolos Dedeloudis | Jackson Sargent | David Jurgens
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

We present POTATO, the Portable text annotation tool, a free, fully open-sourced annotation system that 1) supports labeling many types of text and multimodal data; 2) offers easy-to-configure features to maximize the productivity of both deployers and annotators (convenient templates for common ML/NLP tasks, active learning, keypress shortcuts, keyword highlights, tooltips); and 3) supports a high degree of customization (editable UI, inserting pre-screening questions, attention and qualification tests). Experiments over two annotation tasks suggest that POTATO improves labeling speed through its specially-designed productivity features, especially for long documents and complex tasks. POTATO is available at https://github.com/davidjurgens/potato and will continue to be updated.