Svitlana Volkova


2023

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Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction via Interpretable Neural Networks
Rishabh Joshi | Vidhisha Balachandran | Emily Saldanha | Maria Glenski | Svitlana Volkova | Yulia Tsvetkov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

Keyphrase extraction aims at automatically extracting a list of “important” phrases representing the key concepts in a document. Prior approaches for unsupervised keyphrase extraction resorted to heuristic notions of phrase importance via embedding clustering or graph centrality, requiring extensive domain expertise. Our work presents a simple alternative approach which defines keyphrases as document phrases that are salient for predicting the topic of the document. To this end, we propose INSPECT—an approach that uses self-explaining models for identifying influential keyphrases in a document by measuring the predictive impact of input phrases on the downstream task of the document topic classification. We show that this novel method not only alleviates the need for ad-hoc heuristics but also achieves state-of-the-art results in unsupervised keyphrase extraction in four datasets across two domains: scientific publications and news articles.

2022

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Foundation Models of Scientific Knowledge for Chemistry: Opportunities, Challenges and Lessons Learned
Sameera Horawalavithana | Ellyn Ayton | Shivam Sharma | Scott Howland | Megha Subramanian | Scott Vasquez | Robin Cosbey | Maria Glenski | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of BigScience Episode #5 -- Workshop on Challenges & Perspectives in Creating Large Language Models

Foundation models pre-trained on large corpora demonstrate significant gains across many natural language processing tasks and domains e.g., law, healthcare, education, etc. However, only limited efforts have investigated the opportunities and limitations of applying these powerful models to science and security applications. In this work, we develop foundation models of scientific knowledge for chemistry to augment scientists with the advanced ability to perceive and reason at scale previously unimagined. Specifically, we build large-scale (1.47B parameter) general-purpose models for chemistry that can be effectively used to perform a wide range of in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. Evaluating these models in a zero-shot setting, we analyze the effect of model and data scaling, knowledge depth, and temporality on model performance in context of model training efficiency. Our novel findings demonstrate that (1) model size significantly contributes to the task performance when evaluated in a zero-shot setting; (2) data quality (aka diversity) affects model performance more than data quantity; (3) similarly, unlike previous work, temporal order of the documents in the corpus boosts model performance only for specific tasks, e.g., SciQ; and (4) models pre-trained from scratch perform better on in-domain tasks than those tuned from general-purpose models like Open AI’s GPT-2.

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Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS)
David Bamman | Dirk Hovy | David Jurgens | Katherine Keith | Brendan O'Connor | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS)

2021

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Evaluating Neural Model Robustness for Machine Comprehension
Winston Wu | Dustin Arendt | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

We evaluate neural model robustness to adversarial attacks using different types of linguistic unit perturbations – character and word, and propose a new method for strategic sentence-level perturbations. We experiment with different amounts of perturbations to examine model confidence and misclassification rate, and contrast model performance with different embeddings BERT and ELMo on two benchmark datasets SQuAD and TriviaQA. We demonstrate how to improve model performance during an adversarial attack by using ensembles. Finally, we analyze factors that effect model behavior under adversarial attack, and develop a new model to predict errors during attacks. Our novel findings reveal that (a) unlike BERT, models that use ELMo embeddings are more susceptible to adversarial attacks, (b) unlike word and paraphrase, character perturbations affect the model the most but are most easily compensated for by adversarial training, (c) word perturbations lead to more high-confidence misclassifications compared to sentence- and character-level perturbations, (d) the type of question and model answer length (the longer the answer the more likely it is to be incorrect) is the most predictive of model errors in adversarial setting, and (e) conclusions about model behavior are dataset-specific.

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Evaluating Deception Detection Model Robustness To Linguistic Variation
Maria Glenski | Ellyn Ayton | Robin Cosbey | Dustin Arendt | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media

With the increasing use of machine-learning driven algorithmic judgements, it is critical to develop models that are robust to evolving or manipulated inputs. We propose an extensive analysis of model robustness against linguistic variation in the setting of deceptive news detection, an important task in the context of misinformation spread online. We consider two prediction tasks and compare three state-of-the-art embeddings to highlight consistent trends in model performance, high confidence misclassifications, and high impact failures. By measuring the effectiveness of adversarial defense strategies and evaluating model susceptibility to adversarial attacks using character- and word-perturbed text, we find that character or mixed ensemble models are the most effective defenses and that character perturbation-based attack tactics are more successful.

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Identifying Causal Influences on Publication Trends and Behavior: A Case Study of the Computational Linguistics Community
Maria Glenski | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Causal Inference and NLP

Drawing causal conclusions from observational real-world data is a very much desired but a challenging task. In this paper we present mixed-method analyses to investigate causal influences of publication trends and behavior on the adoption, persistence and retirement of certain research foci – methodologies, materials, and tasks that are of interest to the computational linguistics (CL) community. Our key findings highlight evidence of the transition to rapidly emerging methodologies in the research community (e.g., adoption of bidirectional LSTMs influencing the retirement of LSTMs), the persistent engagement with trending tasks and techniques (e.g., deep learning, embeddings, generative, and language models), the effect of scientist location from outside the US e.g., China on propensity of researching languages beyond English, and the potential impact of funding for large-scale research programs. We anticipate this work to provide useful insights about publication trends and behavior and raise the awareness about the potential for causal inference in the computational linguistics and a broader scientific community.

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CrossCheck: Rapid, Reproducible, and Interpretable Model Evaluation
Dustin Arendt | Zhuanyi Shaw | Prasha Shrestha | Ellyn Ayton | Maria Glenski | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Data Science with Human in the Loop: Language Advances

Evaluation beyond aggregate performance metrics, e.g. F1-score, is crucial to both establish an appropriate level of trust in machine learning models and identify avenues for future model improvements. In this paper we demonstrate CrossCheck, an interactive capability for rapid cross-model comparison and reproducible error analysis. We describe the tool, discuss design and implementation details, and present three NLP use cases – named entity recognition, reading comprehension, and clickbait detection that show the benefits of using the tool for model evaluation. CrossCheck enables users to make informed decisions when choosing between multiple models, identify when the models are correct and for which examples, investigate whether the models are making the same mistakes as humans, evaluate models’ generalizability and highlight models’ limitations, strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, CrossCheck is implemented as a Jupyter widget, which allows for rapid and convenient integration into existing model development workflows.

2020

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Towards Trustworthy Deception Detection: Benchmarking Model Robustness across Domains, Modalities, and Languages
Maria Glenski | Ellyn Ayton | Robin Cosbey | Dustin Arendt | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Rumours and Deception in Social Media (RDSM)

Evaluating model robustness is critical when developing trustworthy models not only to gain deeper understanding of model behavior, strengths, and weaknesses, but also to develop future models that are generalizable and robust across expected environments a model may encounter in deployment. In this paper, we present a framework for measuring model robustness for an important but difficult text classification task – deceptive news detection. We evaluate model robustness to out-of-domain data, modality-specific features, and languages other than English. Our investigation focuses on three type of models: LSTM models trained on multiple datasets (Cross-Domain), several fusion LSTM models trained with images and text and evaluated with three state-of-the-art embeddings, BERT ELMo, and GloVe (Cross-Modality), and character-level CNN models trained on multiple languages (Cross-Language). Our analyses reveal a significant drop in performance when testing neural models on out-of-domain data and non-English languages that may be mitigated using diverse training data. We find that with additional image content as input, ELMo embeddings yield significantly fewer errors compared to BERT or GLoVe. Most importantly, this work not only carefully analyzes deception model robustness but also provides a framework of these analyses that can be applied to new models or extended datasets in the future.

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Understanding and Explicitly Measuring Linguistic and Stylistic Properties of Deception via Generation and Translation
Emily Saldanha | Aparna Garimella | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

Massive digital disinformation is one of the main risks of modern society. Hundreds of models and linguistic analyses have been done to compare and contrast misleading and credible content online. However, most models do not remove the confounding factor of a topic or narrative when training, so the resulting models learn a clear topical separation for misleading versus credible content. We study the feasibility of using two strategies to disentangle the topic bias from the models to understand and explicitly measure linguistic and stylistic properties of content from misleading versus credible content. First, we develop conditional generative models to create news content that is characteristic of different credibility levels. We perform multi-dimensional evaluation of model performance on mimicking both the style and linguistic differences that distinguish news of different credibility using machine translation metrics and classification models. We show that even though generative models are able to imitate both the style and language of the original content, additional conditioning on both the news category and the topic leads to reduced performance. In a second approach, we perform deception style “transfer” by translating deceptive content into the style of credible content and vice versa. Extending earlier studies, we demonstrate that, when conditioned on a topic, deceptive content is shorter, less readable, more biased, and more subjective than credible content, and transferring the style from deceptive to credible content is more challenging than the opposite direction.

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Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science
David Bamman | Dirk Hovy | David Jurgens | Brendan O'Connor | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science

2019

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Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science
Svitlana Volkova | David Jurgens | Dirk Hovy | David Bamman | Oren Tsur
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science

2018

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Identifying and Understanding User Reactions to Deceptive and Trusted Social News Sources
Maria Glenski | Tim Weninger | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

In the age of social news, it is important to understand the types of reactions that are evoked from news sources with various levels of credibility. In the present work we seek to better understand how users react to trusted and deceptive news sources across two popular, and very different, social media platforms. To that end, (1) we develop a model to classify user reactions into one of nine types, such as answer, elaboration, and question, etc, and (2) we measure the speed and the type of reaction for trusted and deceptive news sources for 10.8M Twitter posts and 6.2M Reddit comments. We show that there are significant differences in the speed and the type of reactions between trusted and deceptive news sources on Twitter, but far smaller differences on Reddit.

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RuSentiment: An Enriched Sentiment Analysis Dataset for Social Media in Russian
Anna Rogers | Alexey Romanov | Anna Rumshisky | Svitlana Volkova | Mikhail Gronas | Alex Gribov
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

This paper presents RuSentiment, a new dataset for sentiment analysis of social media posts in Russian, and a new set of comprehensive annotation guidelines that are extensible to other languages. RuSentiment is currently the largest in its class for Russian, with 31,185 posts annotated with Fleiss’ kappa of 0.58 (3 annotations per post). To diversify the dataset, 6,950 posts were pre-selected with an active learning-style strategy. We report baseline classification results, and we also release the best-performing embeddings trained on 3.2B tokens of Russian VKontakte posts.

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Predicting Foreign Language Usage from English-Only Social Media Posts
Svitlana Volkova | Stephen Ranshous | Lawrence Phillips
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)

Social media is known for its multi-cultural and multilingual interactions, a natural product of which is code-mixing. Multilingual speakers mix languages they tweet to address a different audience, express certain feelings, or attract attention. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of 6 million tweets produced by 27 thousand multilingual users speaking 12 other languages besides English. We rely on this corpus to build predictive models to infer non-English languages that users speak exclusively from their English tweets. Unlike native language identification task, we rely on large amounts of informal social media communications rather than ESL essays. We contrast the predictive power of the state-of-the-art machine learning models trained on lexical, syntactic, and stylistic signals with neural network models learned from word, character and byte representations extracted from English only tweets. We report that content, style and syntax are the most predictive of non-English languages that users speak on Twitter. Neural network models learned from byte representations of user content combined with transfer learning yield the best performance. Finally, by analyzing cross-lingual transfer – the influence of non-English languages on various levels of linguistic performance in English, we present novel findings on stylistic and syntactic variations across speakers of 12 languages in social media.

2017

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Multilingual Connotation Frames: A Case Study on Social Media for Targeted Sentiment Analysis and Forecast
Hannah Rashkin | Eric Bell | Yejin Choi | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

People around the globe respond to major real world events through social media. To study targeted public sentiments across many languages and geographic locations, we introduce multilingual connotation frames: an extension from English connotation frames of Rashkin et al. (2016) with 10 additional European languages, focusing on the implied sentiments among event participants engaged in a frame. As a case study, we present large scale analysis on targeted public sentiments toward salient events and entities using 1.2 million multilingual connotation frames extracted from Twitter.

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Separating Facts from Fiction: Linguistic Models to Classify Suspicious and Trusted News Posts on Twitter
Svitlana Volkova | Kyle Shaffer | Jin Yea Jang | Nathan Hodas
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Pew research polls report 62 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media (Gottfried and Shearer, 2016). In a December poll, 64 percent of U.S. adults said that “made-up news” has caused a “great deal of confusion” about the facts of current events (Barthel et al., 2016). Fabricated stories in social media, ranging from deliberate propaganda to hoaxes and satire, contributes to this confusion in addition to having serious effects on global stability. In this work we build predictive models to classify 130 thousand news posts as suspicious or verified, and predict four sub-types of suspicious news – satire, hoaxes, clickbait and propaganda. We show that neural network models trained on tweet content and social network interactions outperform lexical models. Unlike previous work on deception detection, we find that adding syntax and grammar features to our models does not improve performance. Incorporating linguistic features improves classification results, however, social interaction features are most informative for finer-grained separation between four types of suspicious news posts.

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ESTEEM: A Novel Framework for Qualitatively Evaluating and Visualizing Spatiotemporal Embeddings in Social Media
Dustin Arendt | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of ACL 2017, System Demonstrations

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Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation of Spatiotemporal Text Representations in Twitter Streams
Lawrence Phillips | Kyle Shaffer | Dustin Arendt | Nathan Hodas | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

Language in social media is a dynamic system, constantly evolving and adapting, with words and concepts rapidly emerging, disappearing, and changing their meaning. These changes can be estimated using word representations in context, over time and across locations. A number of methods have been proposed to track these spatiotemporal changes but no general method exists to evaluate the quality of these representations. Previous work largely focused on qualitative evaluation, which we improve by proposing a set of visualizations that highlight changes in text representation over both space and time. We demonstrate usefulness of novel spatiotemporal representations to explore and characterize specific aspects of the corpus of tweets collected from European countries over a two-week period centered around the terrorist attacks in Brussels in March 2016. In addition, we quantitatively evaluate spatiotemporal representations by feeding them into a downstream classification task – event type prediction. Thus, our work is the first to provide both intrinsic (qualitative) and extrinsic (quantitative) evaluation of text representations for spatiotemporal trends.

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Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science
Dirk Hovy | Svitlana Volkova | David Bamman | David Jurgens | Brendan O’Connor | Oren Tsur | A. Seza Doğruöz
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science

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Truth of Varying Shades: Analyzing Language in Fake News and Political Fact-Checking
Hannah Rashkin | Eunsol Choi | Jin Yea Jang | Svitlana Volkova | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present an analytic study on the language of news media in the context of political fact-checking and fake news detection. We compare the language of real news with that of satire, hoaxes, and propaganda to find linguistic characteristics of untrustworthy text. To probe the feasibility of automatic political fact-checking, we also present a case study based on PolitiFact.com using their factuality judgments on a 6-point scale. Experiments show that while media fact-checking remains to be an open research question, stylistic cues can help determine the truthfulness of text.

2016

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Inferring Perceived Demographics from User Emotional Tone and User-Environment Emotional Contrast
Svitlana Volkova | Yoram Bachrach
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Account Deletion Prediction on RuNet: A Case Study of Suspicious Twitter Accounts Active During the Russian-Ukrainian Crisis
Svitlana Volkova | Eric Bell
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Approaches to Deception Detection

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science
David Bamman | A. Seza Doğruöz | Jacob Eisenstein | Dirk Hovy | David Jurgens | Brendan O’Connor | Alice Oh | Oren Tsur | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science

2015

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Social Media Predictive Analytics
Svitlana Volkova | Benjamin Van Durme | David Yarowsky | Yoram Bachrach
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

2014

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Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Social Dynamics and Personal Attributes in Social Media
Alice Oh | Benjamin Van Durme | David Yarowsky | Oren Tsur | Svitlana Volkova
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Social Dynamics and Personal Attributes in Social Media

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Inferring User Political Preferences from Streaming Communications
Svitlana Volkova | Glen Coppersmith | Benjamin Van Durme
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Proceedings of the ACL 2014 Student Research Workshop
Ekaterina Kochmar | Annie Louis | Svitlana Volkova | Jordan Boyd-Graber | Bill Byrne
Proceedings of the ACL 2014 Student Research Workshop

2013

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Exploring Demographic Language Variations to Improve Multilingual Sentiment Analysis in Social Media
Svitlana Volkova | Theresa Wilson | David Yarowsky
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Learning to Relate Literal and Sentimental Descriptions of Visual Properties
Mark Yatskar | Svitlana Volkova | Asli Celikyilmaz | Bill Dolan | Luke Zettlemoyer
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Lightly Supervised Learning of Procedural Dialog Systems
Svitlana Volkova | Pallavi Choudhury | Chris Quirk | Bill Dolan | Luke Zettlemoyer
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Exploring Sentiment in Social Media: Bootstrapping Subjectivity Clues from Multilingual Twitter Streams
Svitlana Volkova | Theresa Wilson | David Yarowsky
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2012

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CLex: A Lexicon for Exploring Color, Concept and Emotion Associations in Language
Svitlana Volkova | William B. Dolan | Theresa Wilson
Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics