Leigh Yeh


2019

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Modeling performance differences on cognitive tests using LSTMs and skip-thought vectors trained on reported media consumption.
Maury Courtland | Aida Davani | Melissa Reyes | Leigh Yeh | Jun Leung | Brendan Kennedy | Morteza Dehghani | Jason Zevin
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science

Cognitive tests have traditionally resorted to standardizing testing materials in the name of equality and because of the onerous nature of creating test items. This approach ignores participants’ diverse language experiences that potentially significantly affect testing outcomes. Here, we seek to explain our prior finding of significant performance differences on two cognitive tests (reading span and SPiN) between clusters of participants based on their media consumption. Here, we model the language contained in these media sources using an LSTM trained on corpora of each cluster’s media sources to predict target words. We also model semantic similarity of test items with each cluster’s corpus using skip-thought vectors. We find robust, significant correlations between performance on the SPiN test and the LSTMs and skip-thought models we present here, but not the reading span test.

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Reporting the Unreported: Event Extraction for Analyzing the Local Representation of Hate Crimes
Aida Mostafazadeh Davani | Leigh Yeh | Mohammad Atari | Brendan Kennedy | Gwenyth Portillo Wightman | Elaine Gonzalez | Natalie Delong | Rhea Bhatia | Arineh Mirinjian | Xiang Ren | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Official reports of hate crimes in the US are under-reported relative to the actual number of such incidents. Further, despite statistical approximations, there are no official reports from a large number of US cities regarding incidents of hate. Here, we first demonstrate that event extraction and multi-instance learning, applied to a corpus of local news articles, can be used to predict instances of hate crime. We then use the trained model to detect incidents of hate in cities for which the FBI lacks statistics. Lastly, we train models on predicting homicide and kidnapping, compare the predictions to FBI reports, and establish that incidents of hate are indeed under-reported, compared to other types of crimes, in local press.