Domain Adaptation from User-level Facebook Models to County-level Twitter Predictions

Daniel Rieman, Kokil Jaidka, H. Andrew Schwartz, Lyle Ungar


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
I17-1077
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2017
Address:
Taipei, Taiwan
Editors:
Greg Kondrak, Taro Watanabe
Venue:
IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing
Note:
Pages:
764–773
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/I17-1077
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daniel Rieman, Kokil Jaidka, H. Andrew Schwartz, and Lyle Ungar. 2017. Domain Adaptation from User-level Facebook Models to County-level Twitter Predictions. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 764–773, Taipei, Taiwan. Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.
Cite (Informal):
Domain Adaptation from User-level Facebook Models to County-level Twitter Predictions (Rieman et al., IJCNLP 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/I17-1077.pdf