Enhancing Crisis-Related Tweet Classification with Entity-Masked Language Modeling and Multi-Task Learning

Philipp Seeberger, Korbinian Riedhammer


Abstract
Social media has become an important information source for crisis management and provides quick access to ongoing developments and critical information. However, classification models suffer from event-related biases and highly imbalanced label distributions which still poses a challenging task. To address these challenges, we propose a combination of entity-masked language modeling and hierarchical multi-label classification as a multi-task learning problem. We evaluate our method on tweets from the TREC-IS dataset and show an absolute performance gain w.r.t. F1-score of up to 10% for actionable information types. Moreover, we found that entity-masking reduces the effect of overfitting to in-domain events and enables improvements in cross-event generalization.
Anthology ID:
2022.nlp4pi-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Laura Biester, Dorottya Demszky, Zhijing Jin, Mrinmaya Sachan, Joel Tetreault, Steven Wilson, Lu Xiao, Jieyu Zhao
Venue:
NLP4PI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
70–78
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlp4pi-1.9
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.nlp4pi-1.9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Philipp Seeberger and Korbinian Riedhammer. 2022. Enhancing Crisis-Related Tweet Classification with Entity-Masked Language Modeling and Multi-Task Learning. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI), pages 70–78, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Crisis-Related Tweet Classification with Entity-Masked Language Modeling and Multi-Task Learning (Seeberger & Riedhammer, NLP4PI 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2022.nlp4pi-1.9.pdf