Multilingual Detection of Personal Employment Status on Twitter

Manuel Tonneau, Dhaval Adjodah, Joao Palotti, Nir Grinberg, Samuel Fraiberger


Abstract
Detecting disclosures of individuals’ employment status on social media can provide valuable information to match job seekers with suitable vacancies, offer social protection, or measure labor market flows. However, identifying such personal disclosures is a challenging task due to their rarity in a sea of social media content and the variety of linguistic forms used to describe them. Here, we examine three Active Learning (AL) strategies in real-world settings of extreme class imbalance, and identify five types of disclosures about individuals’ employment status (e.g. job loss) in three languages using BERT-based classification models. Our findings show that, even under extreme imbalance settings, a small number of AL iterations is sufficient to obtain large and significant gains in precision, recall, and diversity of results compared to a supervised baseline with the same number of labels. We also find that no AL strategy consistently outperforms the rest. Qualitative analysis suggests that AL helps focus the attention mechanism of BERT on core terms and adjust the boundaries of semantic expansion, highlighting the importance of interpretable models to provide greater control and visibility into this dynamic learning process.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.453
Original:
2022.acl-long.453v1
Version 2:
2022.acl-long.453v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6564–6587
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.453
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.453
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Manuel Tonneau, Dhaval Adjodah, Joao Palotti, Nir Grinberg, and Samuel Fraiberger. 2022. Multilingual Detection of Personal Employment Status on Twitter. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6564–6587, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual Detection of Personal Employment Status on Twitter (Tonneau et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2022.acl-long.453.pdf
Code
 manueltonneau/twitter-unemployment