Social platforms such as Gab and Parler, branded as `free-speech' networks, have seen a significant growth of their user base in recent years. This popularity is mainly attributed to the stricter moderation enforced by mainstream platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. In this work we provide the first large scale analysis of hate-speech on Parler. We experiment with an array of algorithms for hate-speech detection, demonstrating limitations of transfer learning in that domain, given the illusive and ever changing nature of the ways hate-speech is delivered. In order to improve classification accuracy we annotated 10K Parler posts, which we use to fine-tune a BERT classifier. Classification of individual posts is then leveraged for the classification of millions of users via label propagation over the social network. Classifying users by their propensity to disseminate hate, we find that hate mongers make 16.1\% of Parler active users, and that they have distinct characteristics comparing to other user groups. We find that hate mongers are more active, more central and express distinct levels of sentiment and convey a distinct array of emotions like anger and sadness. We further complement our analysis by comparing the trends discovered in Parler and those found in Gab. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first works to analyze hate speech in Parler in a quantitative manner and on the user level, and the first annotated dataset to be made available to the community.
Common tasks encountered in epidemiology, including disease incidence estimation and causal inference, rely on predictive modeling. Constructing a predictive model can be thought of as learning a prediction function, i.e., a function that takes as input covariate data and outputs a predicted value. Many strategies for learning these functions from data are available, from parametric regressions to machine learning algorithms. It can be challenging to choose an approach, as it is impossible to know in advance which one is the most suitable for a particular dataset and prediction task at hand. The super learner (SL) is an algorithm that alleviates concerns over selecting the one "right" strategy while providing the freedom to consider many of them, such as those recommended by collaborators, used in related research, or specified by subject-matter experts. It is an entirely pre-specified and data-adaptive strategy for predictive modeling. To ensure the SL is well-specified for learning the prediction function, the analyst does need to make a few important choices. In this Education Corner article, we provide step-by-step guidelines for making these choices, walking the reader through each of them and providing intuition along the way. In doing so, we aim to empower the analyst to tailor the SL specification to their prediction task, thereby ensuring their SL performs as well as possible. A flowchart provides a concise, easy-to-follow summary of key suggestions and heuristics, based on our accumulated experience, and guided by theory.
Formality is an important characteristic of text documents. The automatic detection of the formality level of a text is potentially beneficial for various natural language processing tasks, such as retrieval of texts with a desired formality level, integration in language learning and document editing platforms, or evaluating the desired conversation tone by chatbots. Recently two large-scale datasets were introduced for multiple languages featuring formality annotation. However, they were primarily used for the training of style transfer models. However, detection text formality on its own may also be a useful application. This work proposes the first systematic study of formality detection methods based on current (and more classic) machine learning methods and delivers the best-performing models for public usage. We conducted three types of experiments -- monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual. The study shows the overcome of BiLSTM-based models over transformer-based ones for the formality classification task. We release formality detection models for several languages yielding state of the art results and possessing tested cross-lingual capabilities.
We study approaches for compressing the empirical measure in the context of finite dimensional reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs).In this context, the empirical measure is contained within a natural convex set and can be approximated using convex optimization methods. Such an approximation gives under certain conditions rise to a coreset of data points. A key quantity that controls how large such a coreset has to be is the size of the largest ball around the empirical measure that is contained within the empirical convex set. The bulk of our work is concerned with deriving high probability lower bounds on the size of such a ball under various conditions. We complement this derivation of the lower bound by developing techniques that allow us to apply the compression approach to concrete inference problems such as kernel ridge regression. We conclude with a construction of an infinite dimensional RKHS for which the compression is poor, highlighting some of the difficulties one faces when trying to move to infinite dimensional RKHSs.
Automatic text summarization has experienced substantial progress in recent years. With this progress, the question has arisen whether the types of summaries that are typically generated by automatic summarization models align with users' needs. Ter Hoeve et al (2020) answer this question negatively. Amongst others, they recommend focusing on generating summaries with more graphical elements. This is in line with what we know from the psycholinguistics literature about how humans process text. Motivated from these two angles, we propose a new task: summarization with graphical elements, and we verify that these summaries are helpful for a critical mass of people. We collect a high quality human labeled dataset to support research into the task. We present a number of baseline methods that show that the task is interesting and challenging. Hence, with this work we hope to inspire a new line of research within the automatic summarization community.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) such as BERT and GPT have recently achieved great success and become a milestone in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model parameters, large-scale PTMs can effectively capture knowledge from massive labeled and unlabeled data. By storing knowledge into huge parameters and fine-tuning on specific tasks, the rich knowledge implicitly encoded in huge parameters can benefit a variety of downstream tasks, which has been extensively demonstrated via experimental verification and empirical analysis. It is now the consensus of the AI community to adopt PTMs as backbone for downstream tasks rather than learning models from scratch. In this paper, we take a deep look into the history of pre-training, especially its special relation with transfer learning and self-supervised learning, to reveal the crucial position of PTMs in the AI development spectrum. Further, we comprehensively review the latest breakthroughs of PTMs. These breakthroughs are driven by the surge of computational power and the increasing availability of data, towards four important directions: designing effective architectures, utilizing rich contexts, improving computational efficiency, and conducting interpretation and theoretical analysis. Finally, we discuss a series of open problems and research directions of PTMs, and hope our view can inspire and advance the future study of PTMs.
In humans, Attention is a core property of all perceptual and cognitive operations. Given our limited ability to process competing sources, attention mechanisms select, modulate, and focus on the information most relevant to behavior. For decades, concepts and functions of attention have been studied in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computing. For the last six years, this property has been widely explored in deep neural networks. Currently, the state-of-the-art in Deep Learning is represented by neural attention models in several application domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of developments in neural attention models. We systematically reviewed hundreds of architectures in the area, identifying and discussing those in which attention has shown a significant impact. We also developed and made public an automated methodology to facilitate the development of reviews in the area. By critically analyzing 650 works, we describe the primary uses of attention in convolutional, recurrent networks and generative models, identifying common subgroups of uses and applications. Furthermore, we describe the impact of attention in different application domains and their impact on neural networks' interpretability. Finally, we list possible trends and opportunities for further research, hoping that this review will provide a succinct overview of the main attentional models in the area and guide researchers in developing future approaches that will drive further improvements.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.
We propose a novel approach to multimodal sentiment analysis using deep neural networks combining visual analysis and natural language processing. Our goal is different than the standard sentiment analysis goal of predicting whether a sentence expresses positive or negative sentiment; instead, we aim to infer the latent emotional state of the user. Thus, we focus on predicting the emotion word tags attached by users to their Tumblr posts, treating these as "self-reported emotions." We demonstrate that our multimodal model combining both text and image features outperforms separate models based solely on either images or text. Our model's results are interpretable, automatically yielding sensible word lists associated with emotions. We explore the structure of emotions implied by our model and compare it to what has been posited in the psychology literature, and validate our model on a set of images that have been used in psychology studies. Finally, our work also provides a useful tool for the growing academic study of images - both photographs and memes - on social networks.