Center for Advanced Study of Language

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    Choosing your platform for social media drug research and improving your keyword filter list
    (2019) Adams, Nikki; Artigiani, Eleanor Erin; Wish, Eric D.
    Social media research often has two things in common: Twitter is the platform used and a keyword filter list is used to extract only relevant Tweets. Here we propose that (a) alternative platforms be considered more often when doing social media research, and (b) regardless of platform, researchers use word embeddings as a type of synonym discovery to improve their keyword filter list, both of which lead to more relevant data. We demonstrate the benefit of these proposals by comparing how successful our synonym discovery method is at finding terms for marijuana and select opioids on Twitter versus a platform that can be filtered by topic, Reddit. We also find words that are not on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) drug slang list for that year, some of which appear on the list the subsequent year, showing that this method could be employed to find drug terms faster than traditional means.
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    Filtering Tweets for Social Unrest
    (IEEE, 2017-01) Mishler, Alan; Wonus, Kevin; Chambers, Wendy; Bloodgood, Michael
    Since the events of the Arab Spring, there has been increased interest in using social media to anticipate social unrest. While efforts have been made toward automated unrest prediction, we focus on filtering the vast volume of tweets to identify tweets relevant to unrest, which can be provided to downstream users for further analysis. We train a supervised classifier that is able to label Arabic language tweets as relevant to unrest with high reliability. We examine the relationship between training data size and performance and investigate ways to optimize the model building process while minimizing cost. We also explore how confidence thresholds can be set to achieve desired levels of performance.
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    Data Cleaning for XML Electronic Dictionaries via Statistical Anomaly Detection
    (IEEE, 2016) Bloodgood, Michael; Strauss, Benjamin
    Many important forms of data are stored digitally in XML format. Errors can occur in the textual content of the data in the fields of the XML. Fixing these errors manually is time-consuming and expensive, especially for large amounts of data. There is increasing interest in the research, development, and use of automated techniques for assisting with data cleaning. Electronic dictionaries are an important form of data frequently stored in XML format that frequently have errors introduced through a mixture of manual typographical entry errors and optical character recognition errors. In this paper we describe methods for flagging statistical anomalies as likely errors in electronic dictionaries stored in XML format. We describe six systems based on different sources of information. The systems detect errors using various signals in the data including uncommon characters, text length, character-based language models, word-based language models, tied-field length ratios, and tied-field transliteration models. Four of the systems detect errors based on expectations automatically inferred from content within elements of a single field type. We call these single-field systems. Two of the systems detect errors based on correspondence expectations automatically inferred from content within elements of multiple related field types. We call these tied-field systems. For each system, we provide an intuitive analysis of the type of error that it is successful at detecting. Finally, we describe two larger-scale evaluations using crowdsourcing with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform and using the annotations of a domain expert. The evaluations consistently show that the systems are useful for improving the efficiency with which errors in XML electronic dictionaries can be detected.
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    Supplemental Materials for Slevc, Davey, & Linck (2016), A new look at the 'hard problem' of bilingual lexical access: Evidence for language suppression with univalent stimuli
    (2015-10-14) Slevc, L. Robert; Davey, Nicholas; Linck, Jared A.
    This document provides the supporting documentation of the modeling procedure and interim results for the analyses reported in Slevc, Davey, and Linck (2016), A new look at "the hard problem" of bilingual lexical access: Evidence for language suppression with univalent stimuli.
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    A Method for Stopping Active Learning Based on Stabilizing Predictions and the Need for User-Adjustable Stopping
    (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2009-06) Bloodgood, Michael; Vijay-Shanker, K
    A survey of existing methods for stopping active learning (AL) reveals the needs for methods that are: more widely applicable; more aggressive in saving annotations; and more stable across changing datasets. A new method for stopping AL based on stabilizing predictions is presented that addresses these needs. Furthermore, stopping methods are required to handle a broad range of different annotation/performance tradeoff valuations. Despite this, the existing body of work is dominated by conservative methods with little (if any) attention paid to providing users with control over the behavior of stopping methods. The proposed method is shown to fill a gap in the level of aggressiveness available for stopping AL and supports providing users with control over stopping behavior.
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    Taking into Account the Differences between Actively and Passively Acquired Data: The Case of Active Learning with Support Vector Machines for Imbalanced Datasets
    (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2009-06) Bloodgood, Michael; Vijay-Shanker, K
    Actively sampled data can have very different characteristics than passively sampled data. Therefore, it’s promising to investigate using different inference procedures during AL than are used during passive learning (PL). This general idea is explored in detail for the focused case of AL with cost-weighted SVMs for imbalanced data, a situation that arises for many HLT tasks. The key idea behind the proposed InitPA method for addressing imbalance is to base cost models during AL on an estimate of overall corpus imbalance computed via a small unbiased sample rather than the imbalance in the labeled training data, which is the leading method used during PL.
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    An Approach to Reducing Annotation Costs for BioNLP
    (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2008-06) Bloodgood, Michael; Vijay-Shanker, K
    There is a broad range of BioNLP tasks for which active learning (AL) can significantly reduce annotation costs and a specific AL algorithm we have developed is particularly effective in reducing annotation costs for these tasks. We have previously developed an AL algorithm called ClosestInitPA that works best with tasks that have the following characteristics: redundancy in training material, burdensome annotation costs, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) work well for the task, and imbalanced datasets (i.e. when set up as a binary classification problem, one class is substantially rarer than the other). Many BioNLP tasks have these characteristics and thus our AL algorithm is a natural approach to apply to BioNLP tasks.
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    Rapid Adaptation of POS Tagging for Domain Specific Uses
    (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2006-06) Miller, John; Bloodgood, Michael; Torii, Manabu; Vijay-Shanker, K
    Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is a fundamental component for performing natural language tasks such as parsing, information extraction, and question answering. When POS taggers are trained in one domain and applied in significantly different domains, their performance can degrade dramatically. We present a methodology for rapid adaptation of POS taggers to new domains. Our technique is unsupervised in that a manually annotated corpus for the new domain is not necessary. We use suffix information gathered from large amounts of raw text as well as orthographic information to increase the lexical coverage. We present an experiment in the Biological domain where our POS tagger achieves results comparable to POS taggers specifically trained to this domain.
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    Semantically-Informed Syntactic Machine Translation: A Tree-Grafting Approach
    (2010-10) Baker, Kathryn; Bloodgood, Michael; Callison-Burch, Chris; Dorr, Bonnie; Filardo, Nathaniel; Levin, Lori; Miller, Scott; Piatko, Christine
    We describe a unified and coherent syntactic framework for supporting a semantically-informed syntactic approach to statistical machine translation. Semantically enriched syntactic tags assigned to the target-language training texts improved translation quality. The resulting system significantly outperformed a linguistically naive baseline model (Hiero), and reached the highest scores yet reported on the NIST 2009 Urdu-English translation task. This finding supports the hypothesis (posed by many researchers in the MT community, e.g., in DARPA GALE) that both syntactic and semantic information are critical for improving translation quality—and further demonstrates that large gains can be achieved for low-resource languages with different word order than English.
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    Correcting Errors in Digital Lexicographic Resources Using a Dictionary Manipulation Language
    (Trojina Institute for Applied Slovene Studies, 2011-11) Zajic, David; Maxwell, Michael; Doermann, David; Rodrigues, Paul; Bloodgood, Michael
    We describe a paradigm for combining manual and automatic error correction of noisy structured lexicographic data. Modifications to the structure and underlying text of the lexicographic data are expressed in a simple, interpreted programming language. Dictionary Manipulation Language (DML) commands identify nodes by unique identifiers, and manipulations are performed using simple commands such as create, move, set text, etc. Corrected lexicons are produced by applying sequences of DML commands to the source version of the lexicon. DML commands can be written manually to repair one-off errors or generated automatically to correct recurring problems. We discuss advantages of the paradigm for the task of editing digital bilingual dictionaries.