Analyses for linking language with psychological factors or behaviors predominately treat linguistic features as a static set, working with a single document per person or aggregating across multiple posts (e.g. on social media) into a single set of features. This limits language to mostly shed light on between-person differences rather than changes in behavior within-person. Here, we collected a novel dataset of daily surveys where participants were asked to describe their experienced well-being and report the number of alcoholic beverages they had within the past 24 hours. Through this data, we first build a multi-level forecasting model that is able to capture within-person change and leverage both the psychological features of the person and daily well-being responses. Then, we propose a longitudinal version of differential language analysis that finds patterns associated with drinking more (e.g. social events) and less (e.g. task-oriented), as well as distinguishing patterns of heavy drinks versus light drinkers.

Research on psychological risk factors for suicide has developed for decades. However, combining explainable theory with modern data-driven language model approaches is non-trivial. In this study, we propose and evaluate methods for identifying language patterns aligned with theories of suicide risk by combining theory-driven suicidal archetypes with language model-based and relative entropy-based approaches. Archetypes are based on prototypical statements that evince risk of suicidality while relative entropy considers the ratio of how unusual both a risk-familiar and unfamiliar model find the statements. While both approaches independently performed similarly, we find that combining the two significantly improved the performance in the shared task evaluations, yielding our combined system submission with a BERTScore Recall of 0.906. Consistent with the literature, we find that titles are highly informative as suicide risk evidence, despite the brevity. We conclude that a combination of theory- and data-driven methods are needed in the mental health space and can outperform more modern prompt-based methods.

Aimed at the NLP researchers or practitioners who would like to integrate human - individual, group, or societal level factors into their analyses, this tutorial will cover recent techniques and libraries for doing so at each level of analysis. Starting with human-centered techniques that provide benefit to traditional document- or word-level NLP tasks (Garten et al., 2019; Lynn et al., 2017), we undertake a thorough exploration of critical human-level aspects as they pertain to NLP, gradually moving up to higher levels of analysis: individual persons, individual with agent (chat/dialogue), groups of people, and finally communities or societies.

While transformer-based systems have enabled greater accuracies with fewer training examples, data acquisition obstacles still persist for rare-class tasks – when the class label is very infrequent (e.g. < 5% of samples). Active learning has in general been proposed to alleviate such challenges, but choice of selection strategy, the criteria by which rare-class examples are chosen, has not been systematically evaluated. Further, transformers enable iterative transfer-learning approaches. We propose and investigate transfer- and active learning solutions to the rare class problem of dissonance detection through utilizing models trained on closely related tasks and the evaluation of acquisition strategies, including a proposed probability-of-rare-class (PRC) approach. We perform these experiments for a specific rare-class problem: collecting language samples of cognitive dissonance from social media. We find that PRC is a simple and effective strategy to guide annotations and ultimately improve model accuracy while transfer-learning in a specific order can improve the cold-start performance of the learner but does not benefit iterations of active learning.

Anxiety disorders are the most common of mental illnesses, but relatively little is known about how to detect them from language. The primary clinical manifestation of anxiety is worry associated cognitive distortions, which are likely expressed at the discourse-level of semantics. Here, we investigate the development of a modern linguistic assessment for degree of anxiety, specifically evaluating the utility of discourse-level information in addition to lexical-level large language model embeddings. We find that a combined lexico-discourse model outperforms models based solely on state-of-the-art contextual embeddings (RoBERTa), with discourse-level representations derived from Sentence-BERT and DiscRE both providing additional predictive power not captured by lexical-level representations. Interpreting the model, we find that discourse patterns of causal explanations, among others, were used significantly more by those scoring high in anxiety, dovetailing with psychological literature.

Natural language is generated by people, yet traditional language modeling views words or documents as if generated independently. Here, we propose human language modeling (HuLM), a hierarchical extension to the language modeling problem where by a human- level exists to connect sequences of documents (e.g. social media messages) and capture the notion that human language is moderated by changing human states. We introduce, HaRT, a large-scale transformer model for solving HuLM, pre-trained on approximately 100,000 social media users, and demonstrate it’s effectiveness in terms of both language modeling (perplexity) for social media and fine-tuning for 4 downstream tasks spanning document- and user-levels. Results on all tasks meet or surpass the current state-of-the-art.

Psychological states unfold dynamically; to understand and measure mental health at scale we need to detect and measure these changes from sequences of online posts. We evaluate two approaches to capturing psychological changes in text: the first relies on computing the difference between the embedding of a message with the one that precedes it, the second relies on a “human-aware” multi-level recurrent transformer (HaRT). The mood changes of timeline posts of users were annotated into three classes, ‘ordinary,’ ‘switching’ (positive to negative or vice versa) and ‘escalations’ (increasing in intensity). For classifying these mood changes, the difference-between-embeddings technique – applied to RoBERTa embeddings – showed the highest overall F1 score (0.61) across the three different classes on the test set. The technique particularly outperformed the HaRT transformer (and other baselines) in the detection of switches (F1 = .33) and escalations (F1 = .61).Consistent with the literature, the language use patterns associated with mental-health related constructs in prior work (including depression, stress, anger and anxiety) predicted both mood switches and escalations.

Discourse relations are typically modeled as a discrete class that characterizes the relation between segments of text (e.g. causal explanations, expansions). However, such predefined discrete classes limit the universe of potential relationships and their nuanced differences. Adding higher-level semantic structure to contextual word embeddings, we propose representing discourse relations as points in high dimensional continuous space. However, unlike words, discourse relations often have no surface form (relations are in between two segments, often with no word or phrase in that gap) which presents a challenge for existing embedding techniques. We present a novel method for automatically creating discourse relation embeddings (DiscRE), addressing the embedding challenge through a weakly supervised, multitask approach to learn diverse and nuanced relations in social media. Results show DiscRE representations obtain the best performance on Twitter discourse relation classification (macro F1=0.76), social media causality prediction (from F1=0.79 to 0.81), and perform beyond modern sentence and word transformers at traditional discourse relation classification, capturing novel nuanced relations (e.g. relations at the intersection of causal explanations and counterfactuals).

Many recent works in natural language processing have demonstrated ability to assess aspects of mental health from personal discourse. At the same time, pre-trained contextual word embedding models have grown to dominate much of NLP but little is known empirically on how to best apply them for mental health assessment. Using degree of depression as a case study, we do an empirical analysis on which off-the-shelf language model, individual layers, and combinations of layers seem most promising when applied to human-level NLP tasks. Notably, we find RoBERTa most effective and, despite the standard in past work suggesting the second-to-last or concatenation of the last 4 layers, we find layer 19 (sixth-to last) is at least as good as layer 23 when using 1 layer. Further, when using multiple layers, distributing them across the second half (i.e. Layers 12+), rather than last 4, of the 24 layers yielded the most accurate results.

We address dissonant stance detection, classifying conflicting stance between two input statements. Computational models for traditional stance detection have typically been trained to indicate pro/con for a given target topic (e.g. gun control) and thus do not generalize well to new topics. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the generalizability of dissonant stance detection to situations where examples of the topic have not been seen at all or have only been seen a few times. We show that dissonant stance detection models trained on only 8 topics, none of which are the target topic, can perform as well as those trained only on a target topic. Further, adding non-target topics boosts performance further up to approximately 32 topics where accuracies start to plateau. Taken together, our experiments suggest dissonant stance detection models can generalize to new unanticipated topics, an important attribute for the social scientific study of social media where new topics emerge daily.

In human-level NLP tasks, such as predicting mental health, personality, or demographics, the number of observations is often smaller than the standard 768+ hidden state sizes of each layer within modern transformer-based language models, limiting the ability to effectively leverage transformers. Here, we provide a systematic study on the role of dimension reduction methods (principal components analysis, factorization techniques, or multi-layer auto-encoders) as well as the dimensionality of embedding vectors and sample sizes as a function of predictive performance. We first find that fine-tuning large models with a limited amount of data pose a significant difficulty which can be overcome with a pre-trained dimension reduction regime. RoBERTa consistently achieves top performance in human-level tasks, with PCA giving benefit over other reduction methods in better handling users that write longer texts. Finally, we observe that a majority of the tasks achieve results comparable to the best performance with just 1/12 of the embedding dimensions.

Much of natural language processing is focused on leveraging large capacity language models, typically trained over single messages with a task of predicting one or more tokens. However, modeling human language at higher-levels of context (i.e., sequences of messages) is under-explored. In stance detection and other social media tasks where the goal is to predict an attribute of a message, we have contextual data that is loosely semantically connected by authorship. Here, we introduce Message-Level Transformer (MeLT) – a hierarchical message-encoder pre-trained over Twitter and applied to the task of stance prediction. We focus on stance prediction as a task benefiting from knowing the context of the message (i.e., the sequence of previous messages). The model is trained using a variant of masked-language modeling; where instead of predicting tokens, it seeks to generate an entire masked (aggregated) message vector via reconstruction loss. We find that applying this pre-trained masked message-level transformer to the downstream task of stance detection achieves F1 performance of 67%.

The novelty and global scale of the COVID-19 pandemic has lead to rapid societal changes in a short span of time. As government policy and health measures shift, public perceptions and concerns also change, an evolution documented within discourse on social media. We propose a dynamic content-specific LDA topic modeling technique that can help to identify different domains of COVID-specific discourse that can be used to track societal shifts in concerns or views. Our experiments show that these model-derived topics are more coherent than standard LDA topics, and also provide new features that are more helpful in prediction of COVID-19 related outcomes including social mobility and unemployment rate.

One of the major downsides of Deep Learning is its supposed need for vast amounts of training data. As such, these techniques appear ill-suited for NLP areas where annotated data is limited, such as less-resourced languages or emotion analysis, with its many nuanced and hard-to-acquire annotation formats. We conduct a questionnaire study indicating that indeed the vast majority of researchers in emotion analysis deems neural models inferior to traditional machine learning when training data is limited. In stark contrast to those survey results, we provide empirical evidence for English, Polish, and Portuguese that commonly used neural architectures can be trained on surprisingly few observations, outperforming n-gram based ridge regression on only 100 data points. Our analysis suggests that high-quality, pre-trained word embeddings are a main factor for achieving those results.

In this paper, we present an iterative graph-based approach for the detection of symptoms of COVID-19, the pathology of which seems to be evolving. More generally, the method can be applied to finding context-specific words and texts (e.g. symptom mentions) in large imbalanced corpora (e.g. all tweets mentioning #COVID-19). Given the novelty of COVID-19, we also test if the proposed approach generalizes to the problem of detecting Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR). We find that the approach applied to Twitter data can detect symptom mentions substantially before to their being reported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

An increasing number of natural language processing papers address the effect of bias on predictions, introducing mitigation techniques at different parts of the standard NLP pipeline (data and models). However, these works have been conducted individually, without a unifying framework to organize efforts within the field. This situation leads to repetitive approaches, and focuses overly on bias symptoms/effects, rather than on their origins, which could limit the development of effective countermeasures. In this paper, we propose a unifying predictive bias framework for NLP. We summarize the NLP literature and suggest general mathematical definitions of predictive bias. We differentiate two consequences of bias: outcome disparities and error disparities, as well as four potential origins of biases: label bias, selection bias, model overamplification, and semantic bias. Our framework serves as an overview of predictive bias in NLP, integrating existing work into a single structure, and providing a conceptual baseline for improved frameworks.

Not all documents are equally important. Language processing is increasingly finding use as a supplement for questionnaires to assess psychological attributes of consenting individuals, but most approaches neglect to consider whether all documents of an individual are equally informative. In this paper, we present a novel model that uses message-level attention to learn the relative weight of users’ social media posts for assessing their five factor personality traits. We demonstrate that models with message-level attention outperform those with word-level attention, and ultimately yield state-of-the-art accuracies for all five traits by using both word and message attention in combination with past approaches (an average increase in Pearson r of 2.5%). In addition, examination of the high-signal posts identified by our model provides insight into the relationship between language and personality, helping to inform future work.

Human natural language is mentioned at a specific point in time while human emotions change over time. While much work has established a strong link between language use and emotional states, few have attempted to model emotional language in time. Here, we introduce the task of affective language forecasting – predicting future change in language based on past changes of language, a task with real-world applications such as treating mental health or forecasting trends in consumer confidence. We establish some of the fundamental autoregressive characteristics of the task (necessary history size, static versus dynamic length, varying time-step resolutions) and then build on popular sequence models for words to instead model sequences of language-based emotion in time. Over a novel Twitter dataset of 1,900 users and weekly + daily scores for 6 emotions and 2 additional linguistic attributes, we find a novel dual-sequence GRU model with decayed hidden states achieves best results (r = .66) significantly out-predicting, e.g., a moving averaging based on the past time-steps (r = .49). We make our anonymized dataset as well as task setup and evaluation code available for others to build on.

NLP naturally puts a primary focus on leveraging document language, occasionally considering user attributes as supplemental. However, as we tackle more social scientific tasks, it is possible user attributes might be of primary importance and the document supplemental. Here, we systematically investigate the predictive power of user-level features alone versus document-level features for document-level tasks. We first show user attributes can sometimes carry more task-related information than the document itself. For example, a tweet-level stance detection model using only 13 user-level attributes (i.e. features that did not depend on the specific tweet) was able to obtain a higher F1 than the top-performing SemEval participant. We then consider multiple tasks and a wider range of user attributes, showing the performance of strong document-only models can often be improved (as in stance, sentiment, and sarcasm) with user attributes, particularly benefiting tasks with stable “trait-like” outcomes (e.g. stance) most relative to frequently changing “state-like” outcomes (e.g. sentiment). These results not only support the growing work on integrating user factors into predictive systems, but that some of our NLP tasks might be better cast primarily as user-level (or human) tasks.

Mental health predictive systems typically model language as if from a single context (e.g. Twitter posts, status updates, or forum posts) and often limited to a single level of analysis (e.g. either the message-level or user-level). Here, we bring these pieces together to explore the use of open-vocabulary (BERT embeddings, topics) and theoretical features (emotional expression lexica, personality) for the task of suicide risk assessment on support forums (the CLPsych-2019 Shared Task). We used dual context based approaches (modeling content from suicide forums separate from other content), built over both traditional ML models as well as a novel dual RNN architecture with user-factor adaptation. We find that while affect from the suicide context distinguishes with no-risk from those with “any-risk”, personality factors from the non-suicide contexts provide distinction of the levels of risk: low, medium, and high risk. Within the shared task, our dual-context approach (listed as SBU-HLAB in the official results) achieved state-of-the-art performance predicting suicide risk using a combination of suicide-context and non-suicide posts (Task B), achieving an F1 score of 0.50 over hidden test set labels.

Individuals express their locus of control, or “control”, in their language when they identify whether or not they are in control of their circumstances. Although control is a core concept underlying rhetorical style, it is not clear whether control is expressed by how or by what authors write. We explore the roles of syntax and semantics in expressing users’ sense of control –i.e. being “controlled by” or “in control of” their circumstances– in a corpus of annotated Facebook posts. We present rich insights into these linguistic aspects and find that while the language signaling control is easy to identify, it is more challenging to label it is internally or externally controlled, with lexical features outperforming syntactic features at the task. Our findings could have important implications for studying self-expression in social media.

Nowcasting based on social media text promises to provide unobtrusive and near real-time predictions of community-level outcomes. These outcomes are typically regarding people, but the data is often aggregated without regard to users in the Twitter populations of each community. This paper describes a simple yet effective method for building community-level models using Twitter language aggregated by user. Results on four different U.S. county-level tasks, spanning demographic, health, and psychological outcomes show large and consistent improvements in prediction accuracies (e.g. from Pearson r=.73 to .82 for median income prediction or r=.37 to .47 for life satisfaction prediction) over the standard approach of aggregating all tweets. We make our aggregated and anonymized community-level data, derived from 37 billion tweets – over 1 billion of which were mapped to counties, available for research.

Understanding causal explanations - reasons given for happenings in one’s life - has been found to be an important psychological factor linked to physical and mental health. Causal explanations are often studied through manual identification of phrases over limited samples of personal writing. Automatic identification of causal explanations in social media, while challenging in relying on contextual and sequential cues, offers a larger-scale alternative to expensive manual ratings and opens the door for new applications (e.g. studying prevailing beliefs about causes, such as climate change). Here, we explore automating causal explanation analysis, building on discourse parsing, and presenting two novel subtasks: causality detection (determining whether a causal explanation exists at all) and causal explanation identification (identifying the specific phrase that is the explanation). We achieve strong accuracies for both tasks but find different approaches best: an SVM for causality prediction (F1 = 0.791) and a hierarchy of Bidirectional LSTMs for causal explanation identification (F1 = 0.853). Finally, we explore applications of our complete pipeline (F1 = 0.868), showing demographic differences in mentions of causal explanation and that the association between a word and sentiment can change when it is used within a causal explanation.

Predictive models over social media language have shown promise in capturing community outcomes, but approaches thus far largely neglect the socio-demographic context (e.g. age, education rates, race) of the community from which the language originates. For example, it may be inaccurate to assume people in Mobile, Alabama, where the population is relatively older, will use words the same way as those from San Francisco, where the median age is younger with a higher rate of college education. In this paper, we present residualized factor adaptation, a novel approach to community prediction tasks which both (a) effectively integrates community attributes, as well as (b) adapts linguistic features to community attributes (factors). We use eleven demographic and socioeconomic attributes, and evaluate our approach over five different community-level predictive tasks, spanning health (heart disease mortality, percent fair/poor health), psychology (life satisfaction), and economics (percent housing price increase, foreclosure rate). Our evaluation shows that residualized factor adaptation significantly improves 4 out of 5 community-level outcome predictions over prior state-of-the-art for incorporating socio-demographic contexts.

We describe the shared task for the CLPsych 2018 workshop, which focused on predicting current and future psychological health from an essay authored in childhood. Language-based predictions of a person’s current health have the potential to supplement traditional psychological assessment such as questionnaires, improving intake risk measurement and monitoring. Predictions of future psychological health can aid with both early detection and the development of preventative care. Research into the mental health trajectory of people, beginning from their childhood, has thus far been an area of little work within the NLP community. This shared task represents one of the first attempts to evaluate the use of early language to predict future health; this has the potential to support a wide variety of clinical health care tasks, from early assessment of lifetime risk for mental health problems, to optimal timing for targeted interventions aimed at both prevention and treatment.

Trustfulness — one’s general tendency to have confidence in unknown people or situations — predicts many important real-world outcomes such as mental health and likelihood to cooperate with others such as clinicians. While data-driven measures of interpersonal trust have previously been introduced, here, we develop the first language-based assessment of the personality trait of trustfulness by fitting one’s language to an accepted questionnaire-based trust score. Further, using trustfulness as a type of case study, we explore the role of questionnaire size as well as word count in developing language-based predictive models of users’ psychological traits. We find that leveraging a longer questionnaire can yield greater test set accuracy, while, for training, we find it beneficial to include users who took smaller questionnaires which offers more observations for training. Similarly, after noting a decrease in individual prediction error as word count increased, we found a word count-weighted training scheme was helpful when there were very few users in the first place.

Several studies have demonstrated how language models of user attributes, such as personality, can be built by using the Facebook language of social media users in conjunction with their responses to psychology questionnaires. It is challenging to apply these models to make general predictions about attributes of communities, such as personality distributions across US counties, because it requires 1. the potentially inavailability of the original training data because of privacy and ethical regulations, 2. adapting Facebook language models to Twitter language without retraining the model, and 3. adapting from users to county-level collections of tweets. We propose a two-step algorithm, Target Side Domain Adaptation (TSDA) for such domain adaptation when no labeled Twitter/county data is available. TSDA corrects for the different word distributions between Facebook and Twitter and for the varying word distributions across counties by adjusting target side word frequencies; no changes to the trained model are made. In the case of predicting the Big Five county-level personality traits, TSDA outperforms a state-of-the-art domain adaptation method, gives county-level predictions that have fewer extreme outliers, higher year-to-year stability, and higher correlation with county-level outcomes.

We pose the general task of user-factor adaptation – adapting supervised learning models to real-valued user factors inferred from a background of their language, reflecting the idea that a piece of text should be understood within the context of the user that wrote it. We introduce a continuous adaptation technique, suited for real-valued user factors that are common in social science and bringing us closer to personalized NLP, adapting to each user uniquely. We apply this technique with known user factors including age, gender, and personality traits, as well as latent factors, evaluating over five tasks: POS tagging, PP-attachment, sentiment analysis, sarcasm detection, and stance detection. Adaptation provides statistically significant benefits for 3 of the 5 tasks: up to +1.2 points for PP-attachment, +3.4 points for sarcasm, and +3.0 points for stance.

Recommendations are often rated for their subjective quality, but few researchers have studied comment quality in terms of objective utility. We explore recommendation quality assessment with respect to both subjective (i.e. users’ ratings) and objective (i.e., did it influence? did it improve decisions?) metrics in a massive online geopolitical forecasting system, ultimately comparing linguistic characteristics of each quality metric. Using a variety of features, we predict all types of quality with better accuracy than the simple yet strong baseline of comment length. Looking at the most predictive content illustrates rater biases; for example, forecasters are subjectively biased in favor of comments mentioning business transactions or dealings as well as material things, even though such comments do not indeed prove any more useful objectively. Additionally, more complex sentence constructions, as evidenced by subordinate conjunctions, are characteristic of comments leading to objective improvements in forecasting.

We present Differential Language Analysis Toolkit (DLATK), an open-source python package and command-line tool developed for conducting social-scientific language analyses. While DLATK provides standard NLP pipeline steps such as tokenization or SVM-classification, its novel strengths lie in analyses useful for psychological, health, and social science: (1) incorporation of extra-linguistic structured information, (2) specified levels and units of analysis (e.g. document, user, community), (3) statistical metrics for continuous outcomes, and (4) robust, proven, and accurate pipelines for social-scientific prediction problems. DLATK integrates multiple popular packages (SKLearn, Mallet), enables interactive usage (Jupyter Notebooks), and generally follows object oriented principles to make it easy to tie in additional libraries or storage technologies.

Natural language processing has increasingly moved from modeling documents and words toward studying the people behind the language. This move to working with data at the user or community level has presented the field with different characteristics of linguistic data. In this paper, we empirically characterize various lexical distributions at different levels of analysis, showing that, while most features are decidedly sparse and non-normal at the message-level (as with traditional NLP), they follow the central limit theorem to become much more Log-normal or even Normal at the user- and county-levels. Finally, we demonstrate that modeling lexical features for the correct level of analysis leads to marked improvements in common social scientific prediction tasks.

Counterfactual statements, describing events that did not occur and their consequents, have been studied in areas including problem-solving, affect management, and behavior regulation. People with more counterfactual thinking tend to perceive life events as more personally meaningful. Nevertheless, counterfactuals have not been studied in computational linguistics. We create a counterfactual tweet dataset and explore approaches for detecting counterfactuals using rule-based and supervised statistical approaches. A combined rule-based and statistical approach yielded the best results (F1 = 0.77) outperforming either approach used alone.

We explore whether social media can provide a window into community real estate -foreclosure rates and price changes- beyond that of traditional economic and demographic variables. We find language use in Twitter not only predicts real estate outcomes as well as traditional variables across counties, but that including Twitter language in traditional models leads to a significant improvement (e.g. from Pearson r = :50 to r = :59 for price changes). We overcome the challenge of the relative sparsity and noise in Twitter language variables by showing that training on the residual error of the traditional models leads to more accurate overall assessments. Finally, we discover that it is Twitter language related to business (e.g. ‘company’, ‘marketing’) and technology (e.g. ‘technology’, ‘internet’), among others, that yield predictive power over economics.