You Shall Know a User by the Company It Keeps: Dynamic Representations for Social Media Users in NLP

Marco Del Tredici, Diego Marcheggiani, Sabine Schulte im Walde, Raquel Fernández

Abstract
Information about individuals can help to better understand what they say, particularly in social media where texts are short. Current approaches to modelling social media users pay attention to their social connections, but exploit this information in a static way, treating all connections uniformly. This ignores the fact, well known in sociolinguistics, that an individual may be part of several communities which are not equally relevant in all communicative situations. We present a model based on Graph Attention Networks that captures this observation. It dynamically explores the social graph of a user, computes a user representation given the most relevant connections for a target task, and combines it with linguistic information to make a prediction. We apply our model to three different tasks, evaluate it against alternative models, and analyse the results extensively, showing that it significantly outperforms other current methods.
Anthology ID:
D19-1477
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4707–4717
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1477
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1477
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marco Del Tredici, Diego Marcheggiani, Sabine Schulte im Walde, and Raquel Fernández. 2019. You Shall Know a User by the Company It Keeps: Dynamic Representations for Social Media Users in NLP. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 4707–4717, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
You Shall Know a User by the Company It Keeps: Dynamic Representations for Social Media Users in NLP (Del Tredici et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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