NLP datasets annotated with human judgments are rife with disagreements between the judges. This is especially true for tasks depending on subjective judgments such as sentiment analysis or offensive language detection. Particularly in these latter cases, the NLP community has come to realize that the common approach of reconciling’ these different subjective interpretations risks misrepresenting the evidence. Many NLP researchers have therefore concluded that rather than eliminating disagreements from annotated corpora, we should preserve themindeed, some argue that corpora should aim to preserve all interpretations produced by annotators. But this approach to corpus creation for NLP has not yet been widely accepted. The objective of the Le-Wi-Di series of shared tasks is to promote this approach to developing NLP models by providing a unified framework for training and evaluating with such datasets. We report on the second such shared task, which differs from the first edition in three crucial respects: (i) it focuses entirely on NLP, instead of both NLP and computer vision tasks in its first edition; (ii) it focuses on subjective tasks, instead of covering different types of disagreements as training with aggregated labels for subjective NLP tasks is in effect a misrepresentation of the data; and (iii) for the evaluation, we concentrated on soft approaches to evaluation. This second edition of Le-Wi-Di attracted a wide array of partici- pants resulting in 13 shared task submission papers.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) ‘s applied nature makes it necessary to select the most effective and robust models. Producing slightly higher performance is insufficient; we want to know whether this advantage will carry over to other data sets. Bootstrapped significance tests can indicate that ability. So while necessary, computing the significance of models’ performance differences has many levels of complexity. It can be tedious, especially when the experimental design has many conditions to compare and several runs of experiments. We present BooStSa, a tool that makes it easy to compute significance levels with the BOOtSTrap SAmpling procedure to evaluate models that predict not only standard hard labels but soft-labels (i.e., probability distributions over different classes) as well.

Supervised learning assumes that a ground truth label exists. However, the reliability of this ground truth depends on human annotators, who often disagree. Prior work has shown that this disagreement can be helpful in training models. We propose a novel method to incorporate this disagreement as information: in addition to the standard error computation, we use soft-labels (i.e., probability distributions over the annotator labels) as an auxiliary task in a multi-task neural network. We measure the divergence between the predictions and the target soft-labels with several loss-functions and evaluate the models on various NLP tasks. We find that the soft-label prediction auxiliary task reduces the penalty for errors on ambiguous entities, and thereby mitigates overfitting. It significantly improves performance across tasks, beyond the standard approach and prior work.

Spotting a lie is challenging but has an enormous potential impact on security as well as private and public safety. Several NLP methods have been proposed to classify texts as truthful or deceptive. In most cases, however, the target texts’ preceding context is not considered. This is a severe limitation, as any communication takes place in context, not in a vacuum, and context can help to detect deception. We study a corpus of Italian dialogues containing deceptive statements and implement deep neural models that incorporate various linguistic contexts. We establish a new state-of-the-art identifying deception and find that not all context is equally useful to the task. Only the texts closest to the target, if from the same speaker (rather than questions by an interlocutor), boost performance. We also find that the semantic information in language models such as BERT contributes to the performance. However, BERT alone does not capture the implicit knowledge of deception cues: its contribution is conditional on the concurrent use of attention to learn cues from BERT’s representations.

Disagreement between coders is ubiquitous in virtually all datasets annotated with human judgements in both natural language processing and computer vision. However, most supervised machine learning methods assume that a single preferred interpretation exists for each item, which is at best an idealization. The aim of the SemEval-2021 shared task on learning with disagreements (Le-Wi-Di) was to provide a unified testing framework for methods for learning from data containing multiple and possibly contradictory annotations covering the best-known datasets containing information about disagreements for interpreting language and classifying images. In this paper we describe the shared task and its results.

The paper describes the MilaNLP team’s submission (Bocconi University, Milan) in the WASSA 2021 Shared Task on Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification. We focus on Track 2 - Emotion Classification - which consists of predicting the emotion of reactions to English news stories at the essay-level. We test different models based on multi-task and multi-input frameworks. The goal was to better exploit all the correlated information given in the data set. We find, though, that empathy as an auxiliary task in multi-task learning and demographic attributes as additional input provide worse performance with respect to single-task learning. While the result is competitive in terms of the competition, our results suggest that emotion and empathy are not related tasks - at least for the purpose of prediction.

Evaluation is of paramount importance in data-driven research fields such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). Current evaluation practice largely hinges on the existence of a single “ground truth” against which we can meaningfully compare the prediction of a model. However, this comparison is flawed for two reasons. 1) In many cases, more than one answer is correct. 2) Even where there is a single answer, disagreement among annotators is ubiquitous, making it difficult to decide on a gold standard. We argue that the current methods of adjudication, agreement, and evaluation need serious reconsideration. Some researchers now propose to minimize disagreement and to fix datasets. We argue that this is a gross oversimplification, and likely to conceal the underlying complexity. Instead, we suggest that we need to better capture the sources of disagreement to improve today’s evaluation practice. We discuss three sources of disagreement: from the annotator, the data, and the context, and show how this affects even seemingly objective tasks. Datasets with multiple annotations are becoming more common, as are methods to integrate disagreement into modeling. The logical next step is to extend this to evaluation.

The main goal of machine translation has been to convey the correct content. Stylistic considerations have been at best secondary. We show that as a consequence, the output of three commercial machine translation systems (Bing, DeepL, Google) make demographically diverse samples from five languages “sound” older and more male than the original. Our findings suggest that translation models reflect demographic bias in the training data. This opens up interesting new research avenues in machine translation to take stylistic considerations into account.

When interacting with each other, we motivate, advise, inform, show love or power towards our peers. However, the way we interact may also hold some indication on how successful we are, as people often try to help each other to achieve their goals. We study the chat interactions of thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs who discuss and develop business models. We manually annotate a set of about 5,500 chat interactions with four dimensions of interaction styles (motivation, cooperation, equality, advice). We find that these styles can be reliably predicted, and that the communication styles can be used to predict a number of indices of business success. Our findings indicate that successful communicators are also successful in other domains.

Geolocation, predicting the location of a post based on text and other information, has a huge potential for several social media applications. Typically, the problem is modeled as either multi-class classification or regression. In the first case, the classes are geographic areas previously identified; in the second, the models directly predict geographic coordinates. The former requires discretization of the coordinates, but yields better performance. The latter is potentially more precise and true to the nature of the problem, but often results in worse performance. We propose to combine the two approaches in an attentionbased multitask convolutional neural network that jointly predicts both discrete locations and continuous geographic coordinates. We evaluate the multi-task (MTL) model against singletask models and prior work. We find that MTL significantly improves performance, reporting large gains on one data set, but also note that the correlation between labels and coordinates has a marked impact on the effectiveness of including a regression task.

Prior research has shown that geolocation can be substantially improved by including user network information. While effective, it suffers from the curse of dimensionality, since networks are usually represented as sparse adjacency matrices of connections, which grow exponentially with the number of users. In order to incorporate this information, we therefore need to limit the network size, in turn limiting performance and risking sample bias. In this paper, we address these limitations by instead using dense network representations. We explore two methods to learn continuous node representations from either 1) the network structure with node2vec (Grover and Leskovec, 2016), or 2) textual user mentions via doc2vec (Le and Mikolov, 2014). We combine both methods with input from social media posts in an attention-based convolutional neural network and evaluate the contribution of each component on geolocation performance. Our method enables us to incorporate arbitrarily large networks in a fixed-length vector, without limiting the network size. Our models achieve competitive results with similar state-of-the-art methods, but with much fewer model parameters, while being applicable to networks of virtually any size.

Geolocating social media posts relies on the assumption that language carries sufficient geographic information. However, locations are usually given as continuous latitude/longitude tuples, so we first need to define discrete geographic regions that can serve as labels. Most studies use some form of clustering to discretize the continuous coordinates (Han et al., 2016). However, the resulting regions do not always correspond to existing linguistic areas. Consequently, accuracy at 100 miles tends to be good, but degrades for finer-grained distinctions, when different linguistic regions get lumped together. We describe a new algorithm, Point-to-City (P2C), an iterative k-d tree-based method for clustering geographic coordinates and associating them with towns. We create three sets of labels at different levels of granularity, and compare performance of a state-of-the-art geolocation model trained and tested with P2C labels to one with regular k-d tree labels. Even though P2C results in substantially more labels than the baseline, model accuracy increases significantly over using traditional labels at the fine-grained level, while staying comparable at 100 miles. The results suggest that identifying meaningful linguistic areas is crucial for improving geolocation at a fine-grained level.

Most text-classification approaches represent the input based on textual features, either feature-based or continuous. However, this ignores strong non-linguistic similarities like homophily: people within a demographic group use language more similar to each other than to non-group members. We use homophily cues to retrofit text-based author representations with non-linguistic information, and introduce a trade-off parameter. This approach increases in-class similarity between authors, and improves classification performance by making classes more linearly separable. We evaluate the effect of our method on two author-attribute prediction tasks with various training-set sizes and parameter settings. We find that our method can significantly improve classification performance, especially when the number of labels is large and limited labeled data is available. It is potentially applicable as preprocessing step to any text-classification task.

In criminal proceedings, sometimes it is not easy to evaluate the sincerity of oral testimonies. DECOUR - DEception in COURt corpus - has been built with the aim of training models suitable to discriminate, from a stylometric point of view, between sincere and deceptive statements. DECOUR is a collection of hearings held in four Italian Courts, in which the speakers lie in front of the judge. These hearings become the object of a specific criminal proceeding for calumny or false testimony, in which the deceptiveness of the statements of the defendant is ascertained. Thanks to the final Court judgment, that points out which lies are told, each utterance of the corpus has been annotated as true, uncertain or false, according to its degree of truthfulness. Since the judgment of deceptiveness follows a judicial inquiry, the annotation has been realized with a greater degree of confidence than ever before. Moreover, in Italy this is the first corpus of deceptive texts not relying on ‘mock' lies created in laboratory conditions, but which has been collected in a natural environment.