Language models (LMs) are pretrained on diverse data sources—news, discussion forums, books, online encyclopedias. A significant portion of this data includes facts and opinions which, on one hand, celebrate democracy and diversity of ideas, and on the other hand are inherently socially biased. Our work develops new methods to (1) measure media biases in LMs trained on such corpora, along social and economic axes, and (2) measure the fairness of downstream NLP models trained on top of politically biased LMs. We focus on hate speech and misinformation detection, aiming to empirically quantify the effects of political (social, economic) biases in pretraining data on the fairness of high-stakes social-oriented tasks. Our findings reveal that pretrained LMs do have political leanings which reinforce the polarization present in pretraining corpora, propagating social biases into hate speech predictions and media biases into misinformation detectors. We discuss the implications of our findings for NLP research and propose future directions to mitigate unfairness.

Current approaches to empathetic response generation focus on learning a model to predict an emotion label and generate a response based on this label and have achieved promising results. However, the emotion cause, an essential factor for empathetic responding, is ignored. The emotion cause is a stimulus for human emotions. Recognizing the emotion cause is helpful to better understand human emotions so as to generate more empathetic responses. To this end, we propose a novel framework that improves empathetic response generation by recognizing emotion cause in conversations. Specifically, an emotion reasoner is designed to predict a context emotion label and a sequence of emotion cause-oriented labels, which indicate whether the word is related to the emotion cause. Then we devise both hard and soft gated attention mechanisms to incorporate the emotion cause into response generation. Experiments show that incorporating emotion cause information improves the performance of the model on both emotion recognition and response generation.

针对问答立场任务中,现有方法难以提取问答文本间的依赖关系问题,本文提出一种基于循环交互注意力(Recurrent Interactive Attention, RIA)网络的问答立场分析方法。该方法通过模仿人类阅读理解时的思维方式,基于交互注意力机制和循环迭代方法,有效地从问题和答案的相互联系中挖掘问答文本的立场信息。此外,该方法将问题进行陈述化表示,有效地解决疑问句表述下问题文本无法明确表达自身立场的问题。实验结果表明,本文方法取得了比现有模型方法更好的效果,同时证明该方法能有效拟合问答立场分析任务中的问答对依赖关系。

This paper presents the design and construction of a large-scale target-based sentiment annotation corpus on Chinese financial news text. Different from the most existing paragraph/document-based annotation corpus, in this study, target-based fine-grained sentiment annotation is performed. The companies, brands and other financial entities are regarded as the targets. The clause reflecting the profitability, loss or other business status of financial entities is regarded as the sentiment expression for determining the polarity. Based on high quality annotation guideline and effective quality control strategy, a corpus with 8,314 target-level sentiment annotation is constructed on 6,336 paragraphs from Chinese financial news text. Based on this corpus, several state-of-the-art sentiment analysis models are evaluated.

This paper presents a UIR-Miner system for emotion and sentiment analysis evaluation in Twitter in SemEval 2018. Our system consists of three main modules: preprocessing module, stacking module to solve the intensity prediction of emotion and sentiment, LSTM network module to solve multi-label classification, and the hierarchical attention network module for solving emotion and sentiment classification problem. According to the metrics of SemEval 2018, our system gets the final scores of 0.636, 0.531, 0.731, 0.708, and 0.408 on 5 subtasks, respectively.