Articles

AbstractIn common law, the outcome of a new case is determined mostly by precedent cases, rather than by existing statutes. However, how exactly does the precedent influence the outcome of a new case? Answering this question is crucial for guaranteeing fair and consistent judicial decision-making. We are the first to …...

AbstractThe speech act of complaining is used by humans to communicate a negative mismatch between reality and expectations as a reaction to an unfavorable situation. Linguistic theory of pragmatics categorizes complaints into various severity levels based on the face-threat that the complainer is willing to undertake. This is particularly useful …...

AbstractThe framing of political issues can influence policy and public opinion. Even though the public plays a key role in creating and spreading frames, little is known about how ordinary people on social media frame political issues. By creating a new dataset of immigration-related tweets labeled for multiple framing typologies …...

AbstractComputational linguistic research on language change through distributional semantic (DS) models has inspired researchers from fields such as philosophy and literary studies, who use these methods for the exploration and comparison of comparatively small datasets traditionally analyzed by close reading. Research on methods for small data is still in early …...

AbstractNew words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community’s lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a large-scale analysis of over 80k neologisms in 4420 online communities across a …...

AbstractRecent psychological studies indicate that individuals exhibiting suicidal ideation increasingly turn to social media rather than mental health practitioners. Personally contextualizing the buildup of such ideation is critical for accurate identification of users at risk. In this work, we propose a framework jointly leveraging a user’s emotional history and social …...

AbstractNeutralisation techniques, e.g. denial of responsibility and denial of victim, are used in the narrative of climate change scepticism to justify lack of action or to promote an alternative view. We first draw on social science to introduce the problem to the community of nlp, present the granularity of the …...

AbstractUnderstanding how news media frame political issues is important due to its impact on public attitudes, yet hard to automate. Computational approaches have largely focused on classifying the frame of a full news article while framing signals are often subtle and local. Furthermore, automatic news analysis is a sensitive domain, …...

AbstractThe current COVID-19 pandemic has lead to the creation of many corpora that facilitate NLP research and downstream applications to help fight the pandemic. However, most of these corpora are exclusively for English. As the pandemic is a global problem, it is worth creating COVID-19 related datasets for languages other …...

AbstractCant is important for understanding advertising, comedies and dog-whistle politics. However, computational research on cant is hindered by a lack of available datasets. In this paper, we propose a large and diverse Chinese dataset for creating and understanding cant from a computational linguistics perspective. We formulate a task for cant …...

AbstractText style transfer aims to controllably generate text with targeted stylistic changes while maintaining core meaning from the source sentence constant. Many of the existing style transfer benchmarks primarily focus on individual high-level semantic changes (e.g. positive to negative), which enable controllability at a high level but do not offer …...

AbstractWe annotate 17,000 SNS posts with both the writer’s subjective emotional intensity and the reader’s objective one to construct a Japanese emotion analysis dataset. In this study, we explore the difference between the emotional intensity of the writer and that of the readers with this dataset. We found that the …...

AbstractIn the automatic evaluation of generative question answering (GenQA) systems, it is difficult to assess the correctness of generated answers due to the free-form of the answer. Especially, widely used n-gram similarity metrics often fail to discriminate the incorrect answers since they equally consider all of the tokens. To alleviate …...

AbstractThe problem of designing NLP solvers for math word problems (MWP) has seen sustained research activity and steady gains in the test accuracy. Since existing solvers achieve high performance on the benchmark datasets for elementary level MWPs containing one-unknown arithmetic word problems, such problems are often considered “solved” with the …...

AbstractSentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention in e-commerce. The sentiment polarities underlying user reviews are of great value for business intelligence. Aspect category sentiment analysis (ACSA) and review rating prediction (RP) are two essential tasks to detect the fine-to-coarse sentiment polarities. ACSA and RP are highly correlated and usually employed …...

AbstractKnowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) have been intensively explored in recent years due to their promise for a wide range of applications. However, existing studies focus on improving the final model performance without acknowledging the computational cost of the proposed approaches, in terms of execution time and environmental impact. This paper …...

AbstractThis study introduces and analyzes WikiTalkEdit, a dataset of conversations and edit histories from Wikipedia, for research in online cooperation and conversation modeling. The dataset comprises dialog triplets from the Wikipedia Talk pages, and editing actions on the corresponding articles being discussed. We show how the data supports the classic …...

AbstractRecent studies have revealed a security threat to natural language processing (NLP) models, called the Backdoor Attack. Victim models can maintain competitive performance on clean samples while behaving abnormally on samples with a specific trigger word inserted. Previous backdoor attacking methods usually assume that attackers have a certain degree of …...

AbstractPrerequisite relations among concepts are crucial for educational applications, such as curriculum planning and intelligent tutoring. In this paper, we propose a novel concept prerequisite relation learning approach, named CPRL, which combines both concept representation learned from a heterogeneous graph and concept pairwise features. Furthermore, we extend CPRL under weakly …...

AbstractConditional Random Field (CRF) based neural models are among the most performant methods for solving sequence labeling problems. Despite its great success, CRF has the shortcoming of occasionally generating illegal sequences of tags, e.g. sequences containing an “I-” tag immediately after an “O” tag, which is forbidden by the underlying …...