Skyler Wharton


2018

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Using Aspect Extraction Approaches to Generate Review Summaries and User Profiles
Christopher Mitcheltree | Skyler Wharton | Avneesh Saluja
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 3 (Industry Papers)

Reviews of products or services on Internet marketplace websites contain a rich amount of information. Users often wish to survey reviews or review snippets from the perspective of a certain aspect, which has resulted in a large body of work on aspect identification and extraction from such corpora. In this work, we evaluate a newly-proposed neural model for aspect extraction on two practical tasks. The first is to extract canonical sentences of various aspects from reviews, and is judged by human evaluators against alternatives. A k-means baseline does remarkably well in this setting. The second experiment focuses on the suitability of the recovered aspect distributions to represent users by the reviews they have written. Through a set of review reranking experiments, we find that aspect-based profiles can largely capture notions of user preferences, by showing that divergent users generate markedly different review rankings.

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Learning Scalar Adjective Intensity from Paraphrases
Anne Cocos | Skyler Wharton | Ellie Pavlick | Marianna Apidianaki | Chris Callison-Burch
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Adjectives like “warm”, “hot”, and “scalding” all describe temperature but differ in intensity. Understanding these differences between adjectives is a necessary part of reasoning about natural language. We propose a new paraphrase-based method to automatically learn the relative intensity relation that holds between a pair of scalar adjectives. Our approach analyzes over 36k adjectival pairs from the Paraphrase Database under the assumption that, for example, paraphrase pair “really hot” <–> “scalding” suggests that “hot” < “scalding”. We show that combining this paraphrase evidence with existing, complementary pattern- and lexicon-based approaches improves the quality of systems for automatically ordering sets of scalar adjectives and inferring the polarity of indirect answers to “yes/no” questions.