Recent studies have revealed that the widely-used Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) propagate societal biases from the large unmoderated pre-training corpora. Existing solutions require debiasing training processes and datasets for debiasing, which are resource-intensive and costly. Furthermore, these methods hurt the PLMs’ performance on downstream tasks. In this study, we propose Gender-tuning, which debiases the PLMs through fine-tuning on downstream tasks’ datasets. For this aim, Gender-tuning integrates Masked Language Modeling (MLM) training objectives into fine-tuning’s training process. Comprehensive experiments show that Gender-tuning outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of average gender bias scores in PLMs while improving PLMs’ performance on downstream tasks solely using the downstream tasks’ dataset. Also, Gender-tuning is a deployable debiasing tool for any PLM that works with original fine-tuning.

Detecting fine-grained emotions in online health communities provides insightful information about patients’ emotional states. However, current computational approaches to emotion detection from health-related posts focus only on identifying messages that contain emotions, with no emphasis on the emotion type, using a set of handcrafted features. In this paper, we take a step further and propose to detect fine-grained emotion types from health-related posts and show how high-level and abstract features derived from deep neural networks combined with lexicon-based features can be employed to detect emotions.

Empathy captures one’s ability to correlate with and understand others’ emotional states and experiences. Messages with empathetic content are considered as one of the main advantages for joining online health communities due to their potential to improve people’s moods. Unfortunately, to this date, no computational studies exist that automatically identify empathetic messages in online health communities. We propose a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and show that the proposed model outperforms each individual model (CNN and LSTM) as well as several baselines.

In this study, we applied a deep LSTM structure to classify dialogue acts (DAs) in open-domain conversations. We found that the word embeddings parameters, dropout regularization, decay rate and number of layers are the parameters that have the largest effect on the final system accuracy. Using the findings of these experiments, we trained a deep LSTM network that outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Switchboard corpus by 3.11%, and MRDA by 2.2%.