Help! Need Advice on Identifying Advice

Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5295–5306, November 16–20, 2020. c⃝2020 Association for Computational Linguistics 5295 Help! Need Advice on Identifying Advice Venkata S Govindarajan1 Benjamin T Chen2∗ Rebecca Warholic3† Katrin Erk1 Junyi Jessy Li1 1 Department of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin 2 Amazon Inc. 3 McGill University {venkatasg,btchen}@utexas.edu, rebecca.warholic@mail.mcgill.ca, katrin.erk@utexas.edu, jessy@austin.utexas.edu Abstract Humans use language to accomplish a wide variety of tasks – asking for and giving ad- vice being one of them. In online advice fo- rums, advice is mixed in with non-advice, like emotional support, and is sometimes stated ex- plicitly, sometimes implicitly. Understanding the language of advice would equip systems with a better grasp of language pragmatics; practically, the ability to identify advice would drastically increase the efficiency of advice- seeking online, as well as advice-giving in nat- ural language generation systems. We present a dataset in English from two Reddit advice forums – r/AskParents and r/needadvice – annotated for whether sen- tences in posts contain advice or not. Our anal- ysis reveals rich linguistic phenomena in ad- vice discourse. We present preliminary models showing that while pre-trained language mod- els are able to capture advice better than rule- based systems, advice identification is chal- lenging, and we identify directions for future research. 1 Introduction Humans use language in the real world to achieve many goals – communicate intents and desires, to argue and convince, and to ask for and give advice. In recent years, people have increasingly looked to the internet to find advice; advice forums like BabyCenter and r/needadvice have hundreds of thousands of members; studies also showed that people increasingly seek health advice online (Fox and Duggan, 2013; Chen et al., 2018). However, finding the right solution to a problem is difficult, since advice may be spread over multiple posts and pages online. Even within the same post, not * Work done as an undergraduate student at UT Austin. † Work done at UT Austin while on the DREU undergraduate research program. all sentences contain relevant advice, like in the following (truncated) reply to a question titled Is it too late to start a hobby/activity at 12?: (1) ..you can always pick anything up you think is interesting and giving it a shot. You never know what you are good at until you try new things! Idk if you have a budget or maybe borrow tools but you can try woodworking? It’s fun and frustrating (in a good way) at the same time Only the italicised sentences are advice to the ques- tion asked. Both sentences that follow the ad- vice sentences lend support to the advice, rather than containing advice towards a course of action themselves. People also give advice in different ways (Abolfathiasl and Abdullah, 2013), often im- plicitly like in the following reply to a question ti- tled Parenting with a history of depression?, where advice is implicitly conveyed via personal experi- ence: (2) I took my meds the whole …

Content truncated to 500 words