While large-scale pretrained language models have been shown to learn effective linguistic representations for many NLP tasks, there remain many real-world contextual aspects of language that current approaches do not capture. For instance, consider a cloze test “I enjoyed the _____ game this weekend”: the correct answer depends heavily on where the speaker is from, when the utterance occurred, and the speaker’s broader social milieu and preferences. Although language depends heavily on the geographical, temporal, and other social contexts of the speaker, these elements have not been incorporated into modern transformer-based language models. We propose a simple but effective approach to incorporate speaker social context into the learned representations of large-scale language models. Our method first learns dense representations of social contexts using graph representation learning algorithms and then primes language model pretraining with these social context representations. We evaluate our approach on geographically-sensitive language modeling tasks and show a substantial improvement (more than 100% relative lift on MRR) compared to baselines.

Prior research notes that BERT’s computational cost grows quadratically with sequence length thus leading to longer training times, higher GPU memory constraints and carbon emissions. While recent work seeks to address these scalability issues at pre-training, these issues are also prominent in fine-tuning especially for long sequence tasks like document classification. Our work thus focuses on optimizing the computational cost of fine-tuning for document classification. We achieve this by complementary learning of both topic and language models in a unified framework, named TopicBERT. This significantly reduces the number of self-attention operations – a main performance bottleneck. Consequently, our model achieves a 1.4x ( 40%) speedup with 40% reduction in CO2 emission while retaining 99.9% performance over 5 datasets.

With social media becoming increasingly popular on which lots of news and real-time events are reported, developing automated question answering systems is critical to the effective-ness of many applications that rely on real-time knowledge. While previous datasets have concentrated on question answering (QA) for formal text like news and Wikipedia, we present the first large-scale dataset for QA over social media data. To ensure that the tweets we collected are useful, we only gather tweets used by journalists to write news articles. We then ask human annotators to write questions and answers upon these tweets. Unlike otherQA datasets like SQuAD in which the answers are extractive, we allow the answers to be abstractive. We show that two recently proposed neural models that perform well on formal texts are limited in their performance when applied to our dataset. In addition, even the fine-tuned BERT model is still lagging behind human performance with a large margin. Our results thus point to the need of improved QA systems targeting social media text.

The ability to engage in goal-oriented conversations has allowed humans to gain knowledge, reduce uncertainty, and perform tasks more efficiently. Artificial agents, however, are still far behind humans in having goal-driven conversations. In this work, we focus on the task of goal-oriented visual dialogue, aiming to automatically generate a series of questions about an image with a single objective. This task is challenging since these questions must not only be consistent with a strategy to achieve a goal, but also consider the contextual information in the image. We propose an end-to-end goal-oriented visual dialogue system, that combines reinforcement learning with regularized information gain. Unlike previous approaches that have been proposed for the task, our work is motivated by the Rational Speech Act framework, which models the process of human inquiry to reach a goal. We test the two versions of our model on the GuessWhat?! dataset, obtaining significant results that outperform the current state-of-the-art models in the task of generating questions to find an undisclosed object in an image.

A news article’s title, content and link structure often reveal its political ideology. However, most existing works on automatic political ideology detection only leverage textual cues. Drawing inspiration from recent advances in neural inference, we propose a novel attention based multi-view model to leverage cues from all of the above views to identify the ideology evinced by a news article. Our model draws on advances in representation learning in natural language processing and network science to capture cues from both textual content and the network structure of news articles. We empirically evaluate our model against a battery of baselines and show that our model outperforms state of the art by 10 percentage points F1 score.

We present domain independent models to date documents based only on neologism usage patterns. Our models capture patterns of neologism usage over time to date texts, provide insights into temporal locality of word usage over a span of 150 years, and generalize to various domains like News, Fiction, and Non-Fiction with competitive performance. Quite intriguingly, we show that by modeling only the distribution of usage counts over neologisms (the model being agnostic of the particular words themselves), we achieve competitive performance using several orders of magnitude fewer features (only 200 input features) compared to state of the art models some of which use 200K features.

We propose the first generative models for three types of extra-grammatical word formation phenomena abounding in slang: Blends, Clippings, and Reduplicatives. Adopting a data-driven approach coupled with linguistic knowledge, we propose simple models with state of the art performance on human annotated gold standard datasets. Overall, our models reveal insights into the generative processes of word formation in slang – insights which are increasingly relevant in the context of the rising prevalence of slang and non-standard varieties on the Internet

We pose the general task of user-factor adaptation – adapting supervised learning models to real-valued user factors inferred from a background of their language, reflecting the idea that a piece of text should be understood within the context of the user that wrote it. We introduce a continuous adaptation technique, suited for real-valued user factors that are common in social science and bringing us closer to personalized NLP, adapting to each user uniquely. We apply this technique with known user factors including age, gender, and personality traits, as well as latent factors, evaluating over five tasks: POS tagging, PP-attachment, sentiment analysis, sarcasm detection, and stance detection. Adaptation provides statistically significant benefits for 3 of the 5 tasks: up to +1.2 points for PP-attachment, +3.4 points for sarcasm, and +3.0 points for stance.

Natural language processing has increasingly moved from modeling documents and words toward studying the people behind the language. This move to working with data at the user or community level has presented the field with different characteristics of linguistic data. In this paper, we empirically characterize various lexical distributions at different levels of analysis, showing that, while most features are decidedly sparse and non-normal at the message-level (as with traditional NLP), they follow the central limit theorem to become much more Log-normal or even Normal at the user- and county-levels. Finally, we demonstrate that modeling lexical features for the correct level of analysis leads to marked improvements in common social scientific prediction tasks.