Barea Sinno


2019

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Adaptive Ensembling: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Political Document Analysis
Shrey Desai | Barea Sinno | Alex Rosenfeld | Junyi Jessy Li
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Insightful findings in political science often require researchers to analyze documents of a certain subject or type, yet these documents are usually contained in large corpora that do not distinguish between pertinent and non-pertinent documents. In contrast, we can find corpora that label relevant documents but have limitations (e.g., from a single source or era), preventing their use for political science research. To bridge this gap, we present adaptive ensembling, an unsupervised domain adaptation framework, equipped with a novel text classification model and time-aware training to ensure our methods work well with diachronic corpora. Experiments on an expert-annotated dataset show that our framework outperforms strong benchmarks. Further analysis indicates that our methods are more stable, learn better representations, and extract cleaner corpora for fine-grained analysis.