prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. What additional features and context are proposed?
Context 1: Introduction
Abusive language refers to any type of insult, vulgarity, or profanity that debases the target; it also can be anything that causes aggravation BIBREF0 , BIBREF1   Abusive language is often reframed as, but not limited to, offensive language BIBREF2 , cyberbullying BIBREF3 , othering language BIBREF4 , and hate speech BIBREF5  
Recently, an increasing number of users have been subjected to harassment, or have witnessed offensive behaviors online BIBREF6   Major social media companies (i e  Facebook, Twitter) have utilized multiple resources—artificial intelligence, human reviewers, user reporting processes, etc —in effort to censor offensive language, yet it seems nearly impossible to successfully resolve the issue BIBREF7 , BIBREF8  
The major reason of the failure in abusive language detection comes from its subjectivity and context-dependent characteristics BIBREF9   For instance, a message can be regarded as harmless on its own, but when taking previous threads into account it may be seen as abusive, and vice versa  This aspect makes detecting abusive language extremely laborious even for human annotators; therefore it is difficult to build a large and reliable dataset BIBREF10  
Previously, datasets openly available in abusive language detection research on Twitter ranged from 10K to 35K in size BIBREF9 , BIBREF11   This quantity is not sufficient to train the significant number of parameters in deep learning models  Due to this reason, these datasets have been mainly studied by traditional machine learning methods  Most recently, Founta et al  founta2018large introduced Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter, a dataset containing 100K tweets with cross-validated labels  Although this corpus has great potential in training deep models with its significant size, there are no baseline reports to date 
This paper investigates the efficacy of different learning models in detecting abusive language  We compare accuracy using the most frequently studied machine learning classifiers as well as recent neural network models  Reliable baseline results are presented with the first comparative study on this dataset  Additionally, we demonstrate the effect of different features and variants, and describe the possibility for further improvements with the use of ensemble models 
Related Work
The research community introduced various approaches on abusive language detection  Razavi et al  razavi2010offensive applied Naïve Bayes, and Warner and Hirschberg warner2012detecting used Support Vector Machine (SVM), both with word-level features to classify offensive language  Xiang et al  xiang2012detecting generated topic distributions with Latent Dirichlet Allocation BIBREF12 , also using word-level features in order to classify offensive tweets 
More recently, distributed word representations and neural network models have been widely applied for abusive language detection  Djuric et al  djuric2015hate used the Continuous Bag Of Words model with paragraph2vec algorithm BIBREF13 to more accurately detect hate speech than that of the plain Bag Of Words models  Badjatiya et al  badjatiya2017deep implemented Gradient Boosted Decision Trees classifiers using word representations trained by deep learning models  Other researchers have investigated character-level representations and their effectiveness compared to word-level representations BIBREF14 , BIBREF15  
As traditional machine learning methods have relied on feature engineering, (i e  n-grams, POS tags, user information) BIBREF1 , researchers have proposed neural-based models with the advent of larger datasets  Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks have been applied to detect abusive language, and they have outperformed traditional machine learning classifiers such as Logistic Regression and SVM BIBREF15 , BIBREF16   However, there are no studies investigating the efficiency of neural models with large-scale datasets over 100K 
Methodology
This section illustrates our implementations on traditional machine learning classifiers and neural network based models in detail  Furthermore, we describe additional features and variant models investigated 
Traditional Machine Learning Models
We implement five feature engineering based machine learning classifiers that are most often used for abusive language detection  In data preprocessing, text sequences are converted into Bag Of Words (BOW) representations, and normalized with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) values  We experiment with word-level features using n-grams ranging from 1 to 3, and character-level features from 3 to 8-grams  Each classifier is implemented with the following specifications:
Naïve Bayes (NB): Multinomial NB with additive smoothing constant 1
Logistic Regression (LR): Linear LR with L2 regularization constant 1 and limited-memory BFGS optimization
Support Vector Machine (SVM): Linear SVM with L2 regularization constant 1 and logistic loss function
Random Forests (RF): Averaging probabilistic predictions of 10 randomized decision trees
Gradient Boosted Trees (GBT): Tree boosting with learning rate 1 and logistic loss function
Neural Network based Models
Along with traditional machine learning approaches, we investigate neural network based models to evaluate their efficacy within a larger dataset  In particular, we explore Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), and their variant models  A pre-trained GloVe BIBREF17 representation is used for word-level features 
CNN: We adopt Kim's kim2014convolutional implementation as the baseline  The word-level CNN models have 3 convolutional filters of different sizes [1,2,3] with ReLU activation, and a max-pooling layer  For the character-level CNN, we use 6 convolutional filters of various sizes [3,4,5,6,7,8], then add max-pooling layers followed by 1 fully-connected layer with a dimension of 1024 
Park and Fung park2017one proposed a HybridCNN model which outperformed both word-level and character-level CNNs in abusive language detection  In order to evaluate the HybridCNN for this dataset, we concatenate the output of max-pooled layers from word-level and character-level CNN, and feed this vector to a fully-connected layer in order to predict the output 
All three CNN models (word-level, character-level, and hybrid) use cross entropy with softmax as their loss function and Adam BIBREF18 as the optimizer 
RNN: We use bidirectional RNN BIBREF19 as the baseline, implementing a GRU BIBREF20 cell for each recurrent unit  From extensive parameter-search experiments, we chose 1 encoding layer with 50 dimensional hidden states and an input dropout probability of 0 3  The RNN models use cross entropy with sigmoid as their loss function and Adam as the optimizer 
For a possible improvement, we apply a self-matching attention mechanism on RNN baseline models BIBREF21 so that they may better understand the data by retrieving text sequences twice  We also investigate a recently introduced method, Latent Topic Clustering (LTC) BIBREF22   The LTC method extracts latent topic information from the hidden states of RNN, and uses it for additional information in classifying the text data 
Feature Extension
While manually analyzing the raw dataset, we noticed that looking at the tweet one has replied to or has quoted, provides significant contextual information  We call these, “context tweets"  As humans can better understand a tweet with the reference of its context, our assumption is that computers also benefit from taking context tweets into account in detecting abusive language 
As shown in the examples below, (2) is labeled abusive due to the use of vulgar language  However, the intention of the user can be better understood with its context tweet (1) 
(1) I hate when I'm sitting in front of the bus and somebody with a wheelchair get on 
INLINEFORM0 (2) I hate it when I'm trying to board a bus and there's already an as**ole on it 
Similarly, context tweet (3) is important in understanding the abusive tweet (4), especially in identifying the target of the malice 
(3) Survivors of #Syria Gas Attack Recount `a Cruel Scene' 
INLINEFORM0 (4) Who the HELL is “LIKE" ING this post? Sick people    
Huang et al  huang2016modeling used several attributes of context tweets for sentiment analysis in order to improve the baseline LSTM model  However, their approach was limited because the meta-information they focused on—author information, conversation type, use of the same hashtags or emojis—are all highly dependent on data 
In order to avoid data dependency, text sequences of context tweets are directly used as an additional feature of neural network models  We use the same baseline model to convert context tweets to vectors, then concatenate these vectors with outputs of their corresponding labeled tweets  More specifically, we concatenate max-pooled layers of context and labeled tweets for the CNN baseline model  As for RNN, the last hidden states of context and labeled tweets are concatenated 
Dataset
Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter BIBREF10 classifies tweets into 4 labels, “normal", “spam", “hateful" and “abusive"  We were only able to crawl 70,904 tweets out of 99,996 tweet IDs, mainly because the tweet was deleted or the user account had been suspended  Table shows the distribution of labels of the crawled data 
Data Preprocessing
In the data preprocessing steps, user IDs, URLs, and frequently used emojis are replaced as special tokens  Since hashtags tend to have a high correlation with the content of the tweet BIBREF23 , we use a segmentation library BIBREF24 for hashtags to extract more information 
For character-level representations, we apply the method Zhang et al  zhang2015character proposed  Tweets are transformed into one-hot encoded vectors using 70 character dimensions—26 lower-cased alphabets, 10 digits, and 34 special characters including whitespace 
Training and Evaluation
In training the feature engineering based machine learning classifiers, we truncate vector representations according to the TF-IDF values (the top 14,000 and 53,000 for word-level and character-level representations, respectively) to avoid overfitting  For neural network models, words that appear only once are replaced as unknown tokens 
Since the dataset used is not split into train, development, and test sets, we perform 10-fold cross validation, obtaining the average of 5 tries; we divide the dataset randomly by a ratio of 85:5:10, respectively  In order to evaluate the overall performance, we calculate the weighted average of precision, recall, and F1 scores of all four labels, “normal”, “spam”, “hateful”, and “abusive” 
Empirical Results
As shown in Table , neural network models are more accurate than feature engineering based models (i e  NB, SVM, etc ) except for the LR model—the best LR model has the same F1 score as the best CNN model 
Among traditional machine learning models, the most accurate in classifying abusive language is the LR model followed by ensemble models such as GBT and RF  Character-level representations improve F1 scores of SVM and RF classifiers, but they have no positive effect on other models 
For neural network models, RNN with LTC modules have the highest accuracy score, but there are no significant improvements from its baseline model and its attention-added model  Similarly, HybridCNN does not improve the baseline CNN model  For both CNN and RNN models, character-level features significantly decrease the accuracy of classification 
The use of context tweets generally have little effect on baseline models, however they noticeably improve the scores of several metrics  For instance, CNN with context tweets score the highest recall and F1 for “hateful" labels, and RNN models with context tweets have the highest recall for “abusive" tweets 
Discussion and Conclusion
While character-level features are known to improve the accuracy of neural network models BIBREF16 , they reduce classification accuracy for Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter  We conclude this is because of the lack of labeled data as well as the significant imbalance among the different labels  Unlike neural network models, character-level features in traditional machine learning classifiers have positive results because we have trained the models only with the most significant character elements using TF-IDF values 
Variants of neural network models also suffer from data insufficiency  However, these models show positive performances on “spam" (14%) and “hateful" (4%) tweets—the lower distributed labels  The highest F1 score for “spam" is from the RNN-LTC model (0 551), and the highest for “hateful" is CNN with context tweets (0 309)  Since each variant model excels in different metrics, we expect to see additional improvements with the use of ensemble models of these variants in future works 
In this paper, we report the baseline accuracy of different learning models as well as their variants on the recently introduced dataset, Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter  Experimental results show that bidirectional GRU networks with LTC provide the most accurate results in detecting abusive language  Additionally, we present the possibility of using ensemble models of variant models and features for further improvements 
Acknowledgments
K  Jung is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, ASRI, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea  This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No  2016M3C4A7952632), the Technology Innovation Program (10073144) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE, Korea) 
We would also like to thank Yongkeun Hwang and Ji Ho Park for helpful discussions and their valuable insights 
Context 2: Introduction
In June 2015, the operators of the online discussion site Reddit banned several communities under new anti-harassment rules  BIBREF0 used this opportunity to combine rich online data with computational methods to study a current question: Does eliminating these “echo chambers” diminish the amount of hate speech overall? Exciting opportunities like these, at the intersection of “thick” cultural and societal questions on the one hand, and the computational analysis of rich textual data on larger-than-human scales on the other, are becoming increasingly common 
Indeed, computational analysis is opening new possibilities for exploring challenging questions at the heart of some of the most pressing contemporary cultural and social issues  While a human reader is better equipped to make logical inferences, resolve ambiguities, and apply cultural knowledge than a computer, human time and attention are limited  Moreover, many patterns are not obvious in any specific context, but only stand out in the aggregate  For example, in a landmark study, BIBREF1 analyzed the authorship of The Federalist Papers using a statistical text analysis by focusing on style, based on the distribution of function words, rather than content  As another example, BIBREF2 studied what defines English haiku and showed how computational analysis and close reading can complement each other  Computational approaches are valuable precisely because they help us identify patterns that would not otherwise be discernible 
Yet these approaches are not a panacea  Examining thick social and cultural questions using computational text analysis carries significant challenges  For one, texts are culturally and socially situated  They reflect the ideas, values and beliefs of both their authors and their target audiences, and such subtleties of meaning and interpretation are difficult to incorporate in computational approaches  For another, many of the social and cultural concepts we seek to examine are highly contested — hate speech is just one such example  Choices regarding how to operationalize and analyze these concepts can raise serious concerns about conceptual validity and may lead to shallow or obvious conclusions, rather than findings that reflect the depth of the questions we seek to address 
These are just a small sample of the many opportunities and challenges faced in computational analyses of textual data  New possibilities and frustrating obstacles emerge at every stage of research, from identification of the research question to interpretation of the results  In this article, we take the reader through a typical research process that involves measuring social or cultural concepts using computational methods, discussing both the opportunities and complications that often arise  In the Reddit case, for example, hate speech is measured, however imperfectly, by the presence of particular words semi-automatically extracted from a machine learning algorithm  Operationalizations are never perfect translations, and are often refined over the course of an investigation, but they are crucial 
We begin our exploration with the identification of research questions, proceed through data selection, conceptualization, and operationalization, and end with analysis and the interpretation of results  The research process sounds more or less linear this way, but each of these phases overlaps, and in some instances turns back upon itself  The analysis phase, for example, often feeds back into the original research questions, which may continue to evolve for much of the project  At each stage, our discussion is critically informed by insights from the humanities and social sciences, fields that have focused on, and worked to tackle, the challenges of textual analysis—albeit at smaller scales—since their inception 
In describing our experiences with computational text analysis, we hope to achieve three primary goals  First, we aim to shed light on thorny issues not always at the forefront of discussions about computational text analysis methods  Second, we hope to provide a set of best practices for working with thick social and cultural concepts  Our guidance is based on our own experiences and is therefore inherently imperfect  Still, given our diversity of disciplinary backgrounds and research practices, we hope to capture a range of ideas and identify commonalities that will resonate for many  And this leads to our final goal: to help promote interdisciplinary collaborations  Interdisciplinary insights and partnerships are essential for realizing the full potential of any computational text analysis that involves social and cultural concepts, and the more we are able to bridge these divides, the more fruitful we believe our work will be 
Research questions
We typically start by identifying the questions we wish to explore  Can text analysis provide a new perspective on a “big question” that has been attracting interest for years? Or can we raise new questions that have only recently emerged, for example about social media? For social scientists working in computational analysis, the questions are often grounded in theory, asking: How can we explain what we observe? These questions are also influenced by the availability and accessibility of data sources  For example, the choice to work with data from a particular social media platform may be partly determined by the fact that it is freely available, and this will in turn shape the kinds of questions that can be asked  A key output of this phase are the concepts to measure, for example: influence; copying and reproduction; the creation of patterns of language use; hate speech  Computational analysis of text motivated by these questions is insight driven: we aim to describe a phenomenon or explain how it came about  For example, what can we learn about how and why hate speech is used or how this changes over time? Is hate speech one thing, or does it comprise multiple forms of expression? Is there a clear boundary between hate speech and other types of speech, and what features make it more or less ambiguous? In these cases, it is critical to communicate high-level patterns in terms that are recognizable 
This contrasts with much of the work in computational text analysis, which tends to focus on automating tasks that humans perform inefficiently  These tasks range from core linguistically motivated tasks that constitute the backbone of natural language processing, such as part-of-speech tagging and parsing, to filtering spam and detecting sentiment  Many tasks are motivated by applications, for example to automatically block online trolls  Success, then, is often measured by performance, and communicating why a certain prediction was made—for example, why a document was labeled as positive sentiment, or why a word was classified as a noun—is less important than the accuracy of the prediction itself  The approaches we use and what we mean by `success' are thus guided by our research questions 
Domain experts and fellow researchers can provide feedback on questions and help with dynamically revising them  For example, they may say “we already think we know that”, “that's too naïve”, “that doesn't reflect social reality” (negative); “two major camps in the field would give different answers to that question” (neutral); “we tried to look at that back in the 1960s, but we didn't have the technology” (positive); and “that sounds like something that people who made that archive would love”, “that's a really fundamental question” (very positive) 
Sometimes we also hope to connect to multiple disciplines  For example, while focusing on the humanistic concerns of an archive, we could also ask social questions such as “is this archive more about collaborative processes, culture-building or norm creation?” or “how well does this archive reflect the society in which it is embedded?" BIBREF3 used quantitative methods to tell a story about Darwin's intellectual development—an essential biographical question for a key figure in the history of science  At the same time, their methods connected Darwin's development to the changing landscape of Victorian scientific culture, allowing them to contrast Darwin's “foraging” in the scientific literature of his time to the ways in which that literature was itself produced  Finally, their methods provided a case study, and validation of technical approaches, for cognitive scientists who are interested in how people explore and exploit sources of knowledge 
Questions about potential “dual use” may also arise  Returning to our introductory example, BIBREF0 started with a deceptively simple question: if an internet platform eliminates forums for hate speech, does this impact hate speech in other forums? The research was motivated by the belief that a rising tide of online hate speech was (and is) making the internet increasingly unfriendly for disempowered groups, including minorities, women, and LBGTQ individuals  Yet the possibility of dual use troubled the researchers from the onset  Could the methodology be adopted to target the speech of groups like Black Lives Matter? Could it be adopted by repressive governments to minimize online dissent? While these concerns remained, they concluded that hypothetical dual use scenarios did not outweigh the tangible contribution this research could offer towards making the online environment more equal and just 
Data
The next step involves deciding on the data sources, collecting and compiling the dataset, and inspecting its metadata 
Data acquisition
Many scholars in the humanities and the social sciences work with sources that are not available in digital form, and indeed may never be digitized  Others work with both analogue and digitized materials, and the increasing digitization of archives has opened opportunities to study these archives in new ways  We can go to the canonical archive or open up something that nobody has studied before  For example, we might focus on major historical moments (French Revolution, post-Milosevic Serbia) or critical epochs (Britain entering the Victorian era, the transition from Latin to proto-Romance)  Or, we could look for records of how people conducted science, wrote and consumed literature, and worked out their philosophies 
A growing number of researchers work with born-digital sources or data  Born-digital data, e g , from social media, generally do not involve direct elicitation from participants and therefore enable unobtrusive measurements BIBREF5 , BIBREF6   In contrast, methods like surveys sometimes elicit altered responses from participants, who might adapt their responses to what they think is expected  Moreover, born-digital data is often massive, enabling large-scale studies of language and behavior in a variety of social contexts 
Still, many scholars in the social sciences and humanities work with multiple data sources  The variety of sources typically used means that more than one data collection method is often required  For example, a project examining coverage of a UK General Election, could draw data from traditional media, web archives, Twitter and Facebook, campaign manifestos, etc  and might combine textual analysis of these materials with surveys, laboratory experiments, or field observations offline  In contrast, many computational studies based on born-digital data have focused on one specific source, such as Twitter 
The use of born-digital data raises ethical concerns  Although early studies often treated privacy as a binary construct, many now acknowledge its complexity BIBREF7   Conversations on private matters can be posted online, visible for all, but social norms regarding what should be considered public information may differ from the data's explicit visibility settings  Often no informed consent has been obtained, raising concerns and challenges regarding publishing content and potentially harmful secondary uses BIBREF8 , BIBREF4  
Recently, concerns about potential harms stemming from secondary uses have led a number of digital service providers to restrict access to born-digital data  Facebook and Twitter, for example, have reduced or eliminated public access to their application programming interfaces (APIs) and expressed hesitation about allowing academic researchers to use data from their platforms to examine certain sensitive or controversial topics  Despite the seeming abundance of born-digital data, we therefore cannot take its availability for granted 
Working with data that someone else has acquired presents additional problems related to provenance and contextualisation  It may not always be possible to determine the criteria applied during the creation process  For example, why were certain newspapers digitized but not others, and what does this say about the collection? Similar questions arise with the use of born-digital data  For instance, when using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to gather data from archived web pages, we need to consider what pages were captured, which are likely missing, and why 
We must often repurpose born-digital data (e g , Twitter was not designed to measure public opinion), but data biases may lead to spurious results and limit justification for generalization  In particular, data collected via black box APIs designed for commercial, not research, purposes are likely to introduce biases into the inferences we draw, and the closed nature of these APIs means we rarely know what biases are introduced, let alone how severely they might impact our research BIBREF10   These, however, are not new problems  Historians, for example, have always understood that their sources were produced within particular contexts and for particular purposes, which are not always apparent to us 
Non-representative data can still be useful for making comparisons within a sample  In the introductory example on hate speech BIBREF0 , the Reddit forums do not present a comprehensive or balanced picture of hate speech: the writing is almost exclusively in English, the targets of hate speech are mainly restricted (e g , to black people, or women), and the population of writers is shaped by Reddit's demographics, which skew towards young white men  These biases limit the generalizability of the findings, which cannot be extrapolated to other languages, other types of hate speech, and other demographic groups  However, because the findings are based on measurements on the same sort of hate speech and the same population of writers, as long as the collected data are representative of this specific population, these biases do not pose an intractable validity problem if claims are properly restricted 
The size of many newly available datasets is one of their most appealing characteristics  Bigger datasets often make statistics more robust  The size needed for a computational text analysis depends on the research goal: When it involves studying rare events, bigger datasets are needed  However, larger is not always better  Some very large archives are “secretly” collections of multiple and distinct processes that no in-field scholar would consider related  For example, Google Books is frequently used to study cultural patterns, but the over-representation of scientific articles in Google books can be problematic BIBREF11   Even very large born-digital datasets usually cover limited timespans compared to, e g , the Gutenberg archive of British novels 
This stage of the research also raises important questions about fairness  Are marginalized groups, for example, represented in the tweets we have collected? If not, what types of biases might result from analyses relying on those tweets?
Local experts and “informants” can help navigate the data  They can help understand the role an archive plays in the time and place  They might tell us: Is this the central archive, or a peripheral one? What makes it unusual? Or they might tell us how certain underrepresented communities use a social media platform and advise us on strategies for ensuring our data collection includes their perspectives 
However, when it is practically infeasible to navigate the data in this way—for instance, when we cannot determine what is missing from Twitter's Streaming API or what webpages are left out of the Internet Archive—we should be open about the limitations of our analyses, acknowledging the flaws in our data and drawing cautious and reasonable conclusions from them  In all cases, we should report the choices we have made when creating or re-using any dataset 
Compiling data
After identifying the data source(s), the next step is compiling the data  This step is fundamental: if the sources cannot support a convincing result, no result will be convincing  In many cases, this involves defining a “core" set of documents and a “comparison" set  We often have a specific set of documents in mind: an author's work, a particular journal, a time period  But if we want to say that this “core" set has some distinctive property, we need a “comparison" set  Expanding the collection beyond the documents that we would immediately think of has the beneficial effect of increasing our sample size  Having more sources increases the chance that we will notice something consistent across many individually varying contexts 
Comparing sets of documents can sometimes support causal inference, presented as a contrast between a treatment group and a control  In BIBREF0 , the treatment consisted of the text written in the two forums that were eventually closed by Reddit  However, identifying a control group required a considerable amount of time and effort  Reddit is a diverse platform, with a wide variety of interactional and linguistic styles; it would be pointless to compare hate speech forums against forums dedicated to, say, pictures of wrecked bicycles  Chandrasekharan et al  used a matching design, populating the control group with forums that were as similar as possible to the treatment group, but were not banned from Reddit  The goal is to estimate the counterfactual scenario: in this case, what would have happened had the site not taken action against these specific forums? An ideal control would make it possible to distinguish the effect of the treatment — closing the forums — from other idiosyncratic properties of texts that were treated 
We also look for categories of documents that might not be useful  We might remove documents that are meta-discourse, like introductions and notes, or documents that are in a language that is not the primary language of the collection, or duplicates when we are working with archived web pages  However, we need to carefully consider the potential consequences of information we remove  Does its removal alter the data, or the interpretation of the data, we are analyzing? Are we losing anything that might be valuable at a later stage?
Labels and metadata
Sometimes all we have is documents, but often we want to look at documents in the context of some additional information, or metadata  This additional information could tell us about the creation of documents (date, author, forum), or about the reception of documents (flagged as hate speech, helpful review)  Information about text segments can be extremely valuable, but it is also prone to errors, inconsistencies, bias, and missing information  Examining metadata is a good way to check a collection's balance and representativeness  Are sources disproportionately of one form? Is the collection missing a specific time window? This type of curation can be extremely time consuming as it may require expert labeling, but it often leads to the most compelling results  Sometimes metadata are also used as target labels to develop machine learning models  But using them as a “ground truth” requires caution  Labels sometimes mean something different than we expect  For example, a down vote for a social media post could indicate that the content is offensive, or that the voter simply disagreed with the expressed view 
Conceptualization
A core step in many analyses is translating social and cultural concepts (such as hate speech, rumor, or conversion) into measurable quantities  Before we can develop measurements for these concepts (the operationalization step, or the “implementation” step as denoted by BIBREF12 ), we need to define them  In the conceptualization phase we often start with questions such as: who are the domain experts, and how have they approached the topic? We are looking for a definition of the concept that is flexible enough to apply on our dataset, yet formal enough for computational research  For example, our introductory study on hate speech BIBREF0 used a statement on hate speech produced by the European Union Court of Human Rights  The goal was not to implement this definition directly in software but to use it as a reference point to anchor subsequent analyses 
If we want to move beyond the use of ad hoc definitions, it can be useful to distinguish between what political scientists Adcock and Collier call the “background concept” and the “systematized concept” BIBREF13   The background concept comprises the full and diverse set of meanings that might be associated with a particular term  This involves delving into theoretical, conceptual, and empirical studies to assess how a concept has been defined by other scholars and, most importantly, to determine which definition is most appropriate for the particular research question and the theoretical framework in which it is situated  That definition, in turn, represents the systematized concept: the formulation that is adopted for the study 
It is important to consider that for social and cultural concepts there is no absolute ground truth  There are often multiple valid definitions for a concept (the “background” concept in the terms of Adcock and Collier), and definitions might be contested over time  This may be uncomfortable for computer scientists, whose primary measure of success is often based on comparing a model's output against “ground truth” or a “gold standard”, e g , by comparing a sentiment classifier's output against manual annotations  However, the notion of ground truth is uncommon in the humanities and the social sciences and it is often taken too far in machine learning  BIBREF14 notes that in literary criticism and the digital humanities more broadly “interpretation, ambiguity, and argumentation are prized far above ground truth and definitive conclusions"  BIBREF15 draw attention to the different attitudes of literary scholars and computational linguists towards ambiguity, stating that “In Computational Linguistics [  ] ambiguity is almost uniformly treated as a problem to be solved; the focus is on disambiguation, with the assumption that one true, correct interpretation exists " The latter is probably true for tasks such as spam filtering, but in the social sciences and the humanities many relevant concepts are fundamentally unobservable, such as latent traits of political actors BIBREF16 or cultural fit in organizations BIBREF17 , leading to validation challenges  Moreover, when the ground truth comes from people, it may be influenced by ideological priors, priming, simple differences of opinion or perspective, and many other factors BIBREF18   We return to this issue in our discussions on validation and analysis 
Operationalization
In this phase we develop measures (or, “operationalizations”, or “indicators”) for the concepts of interest, a process called “operationalization”  Regardless of whether we are working with computers, the output produced coincides with Adcock and Collier's “scores”—the concrete translation and output of the systematized concept into numbers or labels BIBREF13   Choices made during this phase are always tied to the question “Are we measuring what we intend to measure?” Does our operationalization match our conceptual definition? To ensure validity we must recognize gaps between what is important and what is easy to measure  We first discuss modeling considerations  Next, we describe several frequently used computational approaches and their limitations and strengths 
Modeling considerations
The variables (both predictors and outcomes) are rarely simply binary or categorical  For example, a study on language use and age could focus on chronological age (instead of, e g , social age BIBREF19 )  However, even then, age can be modeled in different ways  Discretization can make the modeling easier and various NLP studies have modeled age as a categorical variable BIBREF20   But any discretization raises questions: How many categories? Where to place the boundaries? Fine distinctions might not always be meaningful for the analysis we are interested in, but categories that are too broad can threaten validity  Other interesting variables include time, space, and even the social network position of the author  It is often preferable to keep the variable in its most precise form  For example, BIBREF21 perform exploration in the context of hypothesis testing by using latitude and longitude coordinates — the original metadata attached to geotagged social media such as tweets — rather than aggregating into administrative units such as counties or cities  This is necessary when such administrative units are unlikely to be related to the target concept, as is the case in their analysis of dialect differences  Focusing on precise geographical coordinates also makes it possible to recognize fine-grained effects, such as language variation across the geography of a city 
Using a particular classification scheme means deciding which variations are visible, and which ones are hidden BIBREF22   We are looking for a categorization scheme for which it is feasible to collect a large enough labeled document collection (e g , to train supervised models), but which is also fine-grained enough for our purposes  Classification schemes rarely exhibit the ideal properties, i e , that they are consistent, their categories are mutually exclusive, and that the system is complete BIBREF22   Borderline cases are challenging, especially with social and cultural concepts, where the boundaries are often not clear-cut  The choice of scheme can also have ethical implications BIBREF22   For example, gender is usually represented as a binary variable in NLP and computational models tend to learn gender-stereotypical patterns  The operationalization of gender in NLP has been challenged only recently BIBREF23 , BIBREF24 , BIBREF25  
Supervised and unsupervised learning are the most common approaches to learning from data  With supervised learning, a model learns from labeled data (e g , social media messages labeled by sentiment) to infer (or predict) these labels from unlabeled texts  In contrast, unsupervised learning uses unlabeled data  Supervised approaches are especially suitable when we have a clear definition of the concept of interest and when labels are available (either annotated or native to the data)  Unsupervised approaches, such as topic models, are especially useful for exploration  In this setting, conceptualization and operationalization may occur simultaneously, with theory emerging from the data BIBREF26   Unsupervised approaches are also used when there is a clear way of measuring a concept, often based on strong assumptions  For example, BIBREF3 measure “surprise” in an analysis of Darwin's reading decisions based on the divergence between two probability distributions 
From an analysis perspective, the unit of text that we are labeling (or annotating, or coding), either automatic or manual, can sometimes be different than one's final unit of analysis  For example, if in a study on media frames in news stories, the theoretical framework and research question point toward frames at the story level (e g , what is the overall causal analysis of the news article?), the story must be the unit of analysis  Yet it is often difficult to validly and reliably code a single frame at the story level  Multiple perspectives are likely to sit side-by-side in a story  Thus, an article on income inequality might point to multiple causes, such as globalization, education, and tax policies  Coding at the sentence level would detect each of these causal explanations individually, but this information would need to be somehow aggregated to determine the overall story-level frame  Sometimes scholars solve this problem by only examining headlines and lead paragraphs, arguing that based on journalistic convention, the most important information can be found at the beginning of a story  However, this leads to a return to a shorter, less nuanced analysis 
From a computational perspective, the unit of text can also make a huge difference, especially when we are using bag-of-words models, where word order within a unit does not matter  Small segments, like tweets, sometimes do not have enough information to make their semantic context clear  In contrast, larger segments, like novels, have too much variation, making it difficult to train focused models  Finding a good segmentation sometimes means combining short documents and subdividing long documents  The word “document" can therefore be misleading  But it is so ingrained in the common NLP lexicon that we use it anyway in this article 
For insight-driven text analysis, it is often critical that high-level patterns can be communicated  Furthermore, interpretable models make it easier to find spurious features, to do error analysis, and to support interpretation of results  Some approaches are effective for prediction, but harder to interpret  The value we place on interpretability can therefore influence the approach we choose  There is an increasing interest in developing interpretable or transparent models in the NLP and machine learning communities 
Annotation
Many studies involve human coders  Sometimes the goal is to fully code the data, but in a computational analysis we often use the labels (or annotations) to train machine learning models to automatically recognize them, and to identify language patterns that are associated with these labels  For example, for a project analyzing rumors online BIBREF27 , conversation threads were annotated along different dimensions, including rumor versus non-rumor and stance towards a rumor 
The collection of annotation choices make up an annotation scheme (or “codebook”)  Existing schemes and annotations can be useful as starting points

ground_truth: using tweets that one has replied or quoted to as contextual information

text sequences of context tweets

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. What background do they have?
Context 2:  Usually settling on an annotation scheme requires several iterations, in which the guidelines are updated and annotation examples are added  For example, a political scientist could use a mixed deductive-inductive strategy for developing a codebook  She starts by laying out a set of theory-driven deductive coding rules, which means that the broad principles of the coding rules are laid out without examining examples first  These are then tested (and possibly adjusted) based on a sample of the data  In line with Adcock and Collier's notion of “content validity” BIBREF13 , the goal is to assess whether the codebook adequately captures the systematized concept  By looking at the data themselves, she gains a better sense of whether some things have been left out of the coding rules and whether anything is superfluous, misleading, or confusing  Adjustments are made and the process is repeated, often with another researcher involved 
The final annotations can be collected using a crowdsourcing platform, a smaller number of highly-trained annotators, or a group of experts  Which type of annotator to use should be informed by the complexity and specificity of the concept  For more complex concepts, highly-trained or expert annotators tend to produce more reliable results  However, complex concepts can sometimes be broken down into micro-tasks that can be performed independently in parallel by crowdsourced annotators  Concepts from highly specialized domains may require expert annotators  In all cases, however, some training will be required, and the training phase should involve continual checks of inter-annotator agreement (i e  intercoder reliability) or checks against a gold standard (e g  quizzes in crowdsourcing platforms) 
We also need to decide how inter-annotator agreement will be measured and what an acceptable level of agreement would be  Krippendorff's alpha is frequently used in the social sciences, but the right measure depends on the type of data and task  For manual coding, we can continually check inter-annotator agreement and begin introducing checks of intra-annotator agreement, too  For most communication scholars using only manual content analysis, an acceptable rate of agreement is achieved when Krippendorf's alpha reaches 0 80 or above  When human-coded data are used to validate machine learning algorithms, the reliability of the human-coded data is even more important  Disagreement between annotators can signal weaknesses of the annotation scheme, or highlight the inherent ambiguity in what we are trying to measure  Disagreement itself can be meaningful and can be integrated in subsequent analyses BIBREF28 , BIBREF29  
Data pre-processing
Preparing the data can be a complex and time-consuming process, often involving working with partially or wholly unstructured data  The pre-processing steps have a big impact on the operationalizations, subsequent analyses and reproducibility efforts BIBREF30 , and they are usually tightly linked to what we intend to measure  Unfortunately, these steps tend to be underreported, but documenting the pre-processing choices made is essential and is analogous to recording the decisions taken during the production of a scholarly edition or protocols in biomedical research  Data may also vary enormously in quality, depending on how it has been generated  Many historians, for example, work with text produced from an analogue original using Optical Character Recognition (OCR)  Often, there will be limited information available regarding the accuracy of the OCR, and the degree of accuracy may even vary within a single corpus (e g  where digitized text has been produced over a period of years, and the software has gradually improved)  The first step, then, is to try to correct for common OCR errors  These will vary depending on the type of text, the date at which the `original' was produced, and the nature of the font and typesetting 
One step that almost everyone takes is to tokenize the original character sequence into the words and word-like units  Tokenization is a more subtle and more powerful process than people expect  It is often done using regular expressions or scripts that have been circulating within the NLP community  Tokenization heuristics, however, can be badly confused by emoticons, creative orthography (e g , U$A, sh!t), and missing whitespace  Multi-word terms are also challenging  Treating them as a single unit can dramatically alter the patterns in text  Many words that are individually ambiguous have clear, unmistakable meanings as terms, like “black hole" or “European Union"  However, deciding what constitutes a multi-word term is a difficult problem  In writing systems like Chinese, tokenization is a research problem in its own right 
Beyond tokenization, common steps include lowercasing, removing punctuation, stemming (removing suffixes), lemmatization (converting inflections to a base lemma), and normalization, which has never been clearly defined, but often includes grouping abbreviations like “U S A " and “USA", ordinals like “1st" and “first", and variant spellings like “noooooo"  The main goal of these steps is to improve the ratio of tokens (individual occurrences) to types (the distinct things in a corpus)  Each step requires making additional assumptions about which distinctions are relevant: is “apple” different from “Apple”? Is “burnt” different from “burned”? Is “cool" different from “coooool"? Sometimes these steps can actively hide useful patterns, like social meaning BIBREF32   Some of us therefore try do as little modification as possible 
From a multilingual perspective, English and Chinese have an unusually simple inflectional system, and so it is statistically reasonable to treat each inflection as a unique word type  Romance languages have considerably more inflections than English; many indigenous North American languages have still more  For these languages, unseen data is far more likely to include previously-unseen inflections, and therefore, dealing with inflections is more important  On the other hand, the resources for handling inflections vary greatly by language, with European languages dominating the attention of the computational linguistics community thus far 
We sometimes also remove words that are not relevant to our goals, for example by calculating vocabulary frequencies  We construct a “stoplist” of words that we are not interested in  If we are looking for semantic themes we might remove function words like determiners and prepositions  If we are looking for author-specific styles, we might remove all words except function words  Some words are generally meaningful but too frequent to be useful within a specific collection  We sometimes also remove very infrequent words  Their occurrences are too low for robust patterns and removing them helps reducing the vocabulary size 
The choice of processing steps can be guided by theory or knowledge about the domain as well as experimental investigation  When we have labels, predictive accuracy of a model is a way to assess the effect of the processing steps  In unsupervised settings, it is more challenging to understand the effects of different steps  Inferences drawn from unsupervised settings can be sensitive to pre-processing choices BIBREF33   Stemming has been found to provide little measurable benefits for topic modeling and can sometimes even be harmful BIBREF34   All in all, this again highlights the need to document these steps 
Finally, we can also mark up the data, e g , by identifying entities (people, places, organizations, etc ) or parts of speech  Although many NLP tools are available for such tasks, they are often challenged by linguistic variation, such as orthographic variation in historical texts BIBREF35 and social media BIBREF32   Moreover, the performance of NLP tools often drops when applying them outside the training domain, such as applying tools developed on newswire texts to texts written by younger authors BIBREF36   Problems (e g , disambiguation in named entity recognition) are sometimes resolved using considerable manual intervention  This combination of the automated and the manual, however, becomes more difficult as the scale of the data increases, and the `certainty' brought by the latter may have to be abandoned 
Dictionary-based approaches
Dictionaries are frequently used to code texts in content analyses BIBREF37   Dictionaries consist of one or more categories (i e  word lists)  Sometimes the output is simply the number of category occurrences (e g , positive sentiment), thus weighting words within a category equally  In some other cases, words are assigned continuous scores  The high transparency of dictionaries makes them sometimes more suitable than supervised machine learning models  However, dictionaries should only be used if the scores assigned to words match how the words are used in the data (see BIBREF38 for a detailed discussion on limitations)  There are many off-the-shelf dictionaries available (e g , LIWC BIBREF39 )  These are often well-validated, but applying them on a new domain may not be appropriate without additional validation  Corpus- or domain-specific dictionaries can overcome limitations of general-purpose dictionaries 
The dictionaries are often manually compiled, but increasingly they are constructed semi-automatically (e g , BIBREF40 )  When we semi-automatically create a word list, we use automation to identify an initial word list, and human insight to filter it  By automatically generating the initial words lists, words can be identified that human annotators might have difficulty intuiting  By manually filtering the lists, we use our theoretical understanding of the target concept to remove spurious features 
In the introduction study, SAGE BIBREF41 was used to obtain a list of words that distinguished the text in the treatment group (subreddits that were closed by Reddit) from text in the control group (similar subreddits that were not closed)  The researchers then returned to the hate speech definition provided by the European Court of Human Rights, and manually filtered the top SAGE words based on this definition  Not all identified words fitted the definition  The others included: the names of the subreddits themselves, names of related subreddits, community-specific jargon that was not directly related to hate speech, and terms such as IQ and welfare, which were frequently used in discourses of hate speech, but had significant other uses  The word lists provided the measurement instrument for their main result, which is that the use of hate speech throughout Reddit declined after the two treatment subreddits were closed 
Supervised models
Supervised learning is frequently used to scale up analyses  For example, BIBREF42 wanted to analyze the motivations of Movember campaign participants  By developing a classifier based on a small set of annotations, they were able to expand the analysis to over 90k participants 
The choice of supervised learning model is often guided by the task definition and the label types  For example, to identify stance towards rumors based on sequential annotations, an algorithm for learning from sequential BIBREF43 or time series data BIBREF44 could be used  The features (sometimes called variables or predictors) are used by the model to make the predictions  They may vary from content-based features such as single words, sequences of words, or information about their syntactic structure, to meta-information such as user or network information  Deciding on the features requires experimentation and expert insight and is often called feature engineering  For insight-driven analysis, we are often interested in why a prediction has been made and features that can be interpreted by humans may be preferred  Recent neural network approaches often use simple features as input (such as word embeddings or character sequences), which requires less feature engineering but make interpretation more difficult 
Supervised models are powerful, but they can latch on to spurious features of the dataset  This is particularly true for datasets that are not well-balanced, and for annotations that are noisy  In our introductory example on hate speech in Reddit BIBREF0 , the annotations are automatically derived from the forum in which each post appears, and indeed, many of the posts in the forums (subreddits) that were banned by Reddit would be perceived by many as hate speech  But even in banned subreddits, not all of the content is hate speech (e g , some of the top features were self-referential like the name of the subreddit) but a classifier would learn a high weight for these features 
Even when expert annotations are available on the level of individual posts, spurious features may remain  BIBREF45 produced expert annotations of hate speech on Twitter  They found that one of the strongest features for sexism is the name of an Australian TV show, because people like to post sexist comments about the contestants  If we are trying to make claims about what inhibits or encourages hate speech, we would not want those claims to be tied to the TV show's popularity  Such problems are inevitable when datasets are not well-balanced over time, across genres, topics, etc  Especially with social media data, we lack a clear and objective definition of `balance' at this time 
The risk of supervised models latching on to spurious features reinforces the need for interpretability  Although the development of supervised models is usually performance driven, placing more emphasis on interpretability could increase the adoption of these models in insight-driven analyses  One way would be to only use models that are already somewhat interpretable, for example models that use a small number of human-interpretable features  Rather than imposing such restrictions, there is also work on generating post-hoc explanations for individual predictions (e g , BIBREF46 ), even when the underlying model itself is very complex 
Topic modeling
Topic models (e g , LDA BIBREF47 ) are usually unsupervised and therefore less biased towards human-defined categories  They are especially suited for insight-driven analysis, because they are constrained in ways that make their output interpretable  Although there is no guarantee that a “topic” will correspond to a recognizable theme or event or discourse, they often do so in ways that other methods do not  Their easy applicability without supervision and ready interpretability make topic models good for exploration  Topic models are less successful for many performance-driven applications  Raw word features are almost always better than topics for search and document classification  LSTMs and other neural network models are better as language models  Continuous word embeddings have more expressive power to represent fine-grained semantic similarities between words 
A topic model provides a different perspective on a collection  It creates a set of probability distributions over the vocabulary of the collection, which, when combined together in different proportions, best match the content of the collection  We can sort the words in each of these distributions in descending order by probability, take some arbitrary number of most-probable words, and get a sense of what (if anything) the topic is “about”  Each of the text segments also has its own distribution over the topics, and we can sort these segments by their probability within a given topic to get a sense of how that topic is used 
One of the most common questions about topic models is how many topics to use, usually with the implicit assumption that there is a “right” number that is inherent in the collection  We prefer to think of this parameter as more like the scale of a map or the magnification of a microscope  The “right” number is determined by the needs of the user, not by the collection  If the analyst is looking for a broad overview, a relatively small number of topics may be best  If the analyst is looking for fine-grained phenomena, a larger number is better 
After fitting the model, it may be necessary to circle back to an earlier phase  Topic models find consistent patterns  When authors repeatedly use a particular theme or discourse, that repetition creates a consistent pattern  But other factors can also create similar patterns, which look as good to the algorithm  We might notice a topic that has highest probability on French stopwords, indicating that we need to do a better job of filtering by language  We might notice a topic of word fragments, such as “ing”, “tion”, “inter”, indicating that we are not handling end-of-line hyphenation correctly  We may need to add to our stoplist or change how we curate multi-word terms 
Validation
The output of our measurement procedures (in the social sciences often called the “scores”) must now be assessed in terms of their reliability and validity with regard to the (systemized) concept  Reliability aims to capture repeatability, i e  the extent to which a given tool provides consistent results 
Validity assesses the extent to which a given measurement tool measures what it is supposed to measure  In NLP and machine learning, most models are primarily evaluated by comparing the machine-generated labels against an annotated sample  This approach presumes that the human output is the “gold standard" against which performance should be tested  In contrast, when the reliability is measured based on the output of different annotators, no coder is taken as the standard and the likelihood of coders reaching agreement by chance (rather than because they are “correct") is factored into the resulting statistic  Comparing against a “gold standard” suggests that the threshold for human inter- and intra-coder reliability should be particularly high 
Accuracy, as well as other measures such as precision, recall and F-score, are sometimes presented as a measure of validity, but if we do not have a genuinely objective determination of what something is supposed measure—as is often the case in text analysis—then accuracy is perhaps a better indication of reliability than of validity  In that case, validity needs to be assessed based on other techniques like those we discuss later in this section  It is also worth asking what level of accuracy is sufficient for our analysis and to what extent there may be an upper bound, especially when the labels are native to the data or when the notion of a “gold standard” is not appropriate 
For some in the humanities, validation takes the form of close reading, not designed to confirm whether the model output is correct, but to present what BIBREF48 refers to as a form of “further discovery in two directions”  Model outputs tell us something about the texts, while a close reading of the texts alongside those outputs tells us something about the models that can be used for more effective model building  Applying this circular, iterative process to 450 18th-century novels written in three languages, Piper was able to uncover a new form of “conversional novel” that was not previously captured in “literary history's received critical categories” BIBREF48  
Along similar lines, we can subject both the machine-generated output and the human annotations to another round of content validation  That is, take a stratified random sample, selecting observations from the full range of scores, and ask: Do these make sense in light of the systematized concept? If not, what seems to be missing? Or is something extraneous being captured? This is primarily a qualitative process that requires returning to theory and interrogating the systematized concept, indicators, and scores together  This type of validation is rarely done in NLP, but it is especially important when it is difficult to assess what drives a given machine learning model  If there is a mismatch between the scores and systematized concept at this stage, the codebook may need to be adjusted, human coders retrained, more training data prepared, algorithms adjusted, or in some instances, even a new analytical method adopted 
Other types of validation are also possible, such as comparing with other approaches that aim to capture the same concept, or comparing the output with external measures (e g , public opinion polls, the occurrence of future events)  We can also go beyond only evaluating the labels (or point estimates)  BIBREF16 used human judgments to not only assess the positional estimates from a scaling method of latent political traits but also to assess uncertainty intervals  Using different types of validation can increase our confidence in the approach, especially when there is no clear notion of ground truth 
Besides focusing on rather abstract evaluation measures, we could also assess the models in task-based settings using human experts  Furthermore, for insight-driven analyses, it can be more useful to focus on improving explanatory power than making small improvements in predictive performance 
Analysis
In this phase, we use our models to explore or answer our research questions  For example, given a topic model we can look at the connection between topics and metadata elements  Tags such as “hate speech" or metadata information imply a certain way of organizing the collection  Computational models provide another organization, which may differ in ways that provide more insight into how these categories manifest themselves, or fail to do so 
Moreover, when using a supervised approach, the “errors”, i e  disagreement between the system output and human-provided labels, can point towards interesting cases for closer analysis and help us reflect on our conceptualizations  In the words of BIBREF2 , they can be “opportunities for interpretation”  Other types of “failures” can be insightful as well  Sometimes there is a “dog that didn't bark” BIBREF49 –i e , something that everyone thinks we should have found, but we did not  Or, sometimes the failures are telling us about the existence of something in the data that nobody noticed, or thought important, until then (e g , the large number of travel journals in Darwin's reading lists) 
Computational text analysis is not a replacement for but rather an addition to the approaches one can take to analyze social and cultural phenomena using textual data  By moving back and forth between large-scale computational analyses and small-scale qualitative analyses, we can combine their strengths so that we can identify large-scale and long-term trends, but also tell individual stories  For example, the Reddit study on hate speech BIBREF0 raised various follow-up questions: Can we distinguish hate speech from people talking about hate speech? Did people find new ways to express hate speech? If so, did the total amount of online hate speech decrease after all? As possible next steps, a qualitative discourse analyst might examine a smaller corpus to investigate whether commenters were indeed expressing hate speech in new ways; a specialist in interview methodologies might reach out to commenters to better understand the role of online hate speech in their lives  Computational text analysis represents a step towards better understanding social and cultural phenomena, and it is in many cases better suited towards opening questions rather than closing them 
Conclusion
Insight-driven computational analysis of text is becoming increasingly common  It not only helps us see more broadly, it helps us see subtle patterns more clearly and allows us to explore radical new questions about culture and society  In this article we have consolidated our experiences, as scholars from very different disciplines, in analyzing text as social and cultural data and described how the research process often unfolds  Each of the steps in the process is time-consuming and labor-intensive  Each presents challenges  And especially when working across disciplines, the research often involves a fair amount of discussion—even negotiation—about what means of operationalization and approaches to analysis are appropriate and feasible  And yet, with a bit of perseverance and mutual understanding, conceptually sound and meaningful work results so that we can truly make use of the exciting opportunities rich textual data offers 
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by The Alan Turing Institute under the EPSRC grant EP/N510129/1  Dong Nguyen is supported with an Alan Turing Institute Fellowship (TU/A/000006)  Maria Liakata is a Turing fellow at 40%  We would also like to thank the participants of the “Bridging disciplines in analysing text as social and cultural data” workshop held at the Turing Institute (2017) for insightful discussions  The workshop was funded by a Turing Institute seed funding award to Nguyen and Liakata 

ground_truth: Unanswerable

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. Which models did they experiment with?
Context 3: Introduction
In the field of natural language processing (NLP), the most prevalent neural approach to obtaining sentence representations is to use recurrent neural networks (RNNs), where words in a sentence are processed in a sequential and recurrent manner  Along with their intuitive design, RNNs have shown outstanding performance across various NLP tasks e g  language modeling BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , machine translation BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , text classification BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , and parsing BIBREF7 , BIBREF8  
Among several variants of the original RNN BIBREF9 , gated recurrent architectures such as long short-term memory (LSTM) BIBREF10 and gated recurrent unit (GRU) BIBREF2 have been accepted as de-facto standard choices for RNNs due to their capability of addressing the vanishing and exploding gradient problem and considering long-term dependencies  Gated RNNs achieve these properties by introducing additional gating units that learn to control the amount of information to be transferred or forgotten BIBREF11 , and are proven to work well without relying on complex optimization algorithms or careful initialization BIBREF12  
Meanwhile, the common practice for further enhancing the expressiveness of RNNs is to stack multiple RNN layers, each of which has distinct parameter sets (stacked RNN) BIBREF13 , BIBREF14   In stacked RNNs, the hidden states of a layer are fed as input to the subsequent layer, and they are shown to work well due to increased depth BIBREF15 or their ability to capture hierarchical time series BIBREF16 which are inherent to the nature of the problem being modeled 
However this setting of stacking RNNs might hinder the possibility of more sophisticated recurrence-based structures since the information from lower layers is simply treated as input to the next layer, rather than as another class of state that participates in core RNN computations  Especially for gated RNNs such as LSTMs and GRUs, this means that layer-to-layer connections cannot fully benefit from the carefully constructed gating mechanism used in temporal transitions  Some recent work on stacking RNNs suggests alternative methods that encourage direct and effective interaction between RNN layers by adding residual connections BIBREF17 , BIBREF18 , by shortcut connections BIBREF18 , BIBREF19 , or by using cell states of LSTMs BIBREF20 , BIBREF21  
In this paper, we propose a method of constructing multi-layer LSTMs where cell states are used in controlling the vertical information flow  This system utilizes states from the left and the lower context equally in computation of the new state, thus the information from lower layers is elaborately filtered and reflected through a soft gating mechanism  Our method is easy-to-implement, effective, and can replace conventional stacked LSTMs without much modification of the overall architecture 
We call the proposed architecture Cell-aware Stacked LSTM, or CAS-LSTM, and evaluate our method on multiple benchmark datasets: SNLI BIBREF22 , MultiNLI BIBREF23 , Quora Question Pairs BIBREF24 , and SST BIBREF25   From experiments we show that the CAS-LSTMs consistently outperform typical stacked LSTMs, opening the possibility of performance improvement of architectures that use stacked LSTMs 
Our contribution is summarized as follows 
This paper is organized as follows  We give a detailed description about the proposed method in § SECREF2   Experimental results are given in § SECREF3   We study prior work related to our objective in § SECREF4 and conclude in § SECREF5  
Model Description
In this section, we give a detailed formulation of the architectures used in experiments 
Notation
Throughout this paper, we denote matrices as boldface capital letters ( INLINEFORM0 ), vectors as boldface lowercase letters ( INLINEFORM1 ), and scalars as normal italic letters ( INLINEFORM2 )  For LSTM states, we denote a hidden state as INLINEFORM3 and a cell state as INLINEFORM4   Also, a layer index of INLINEFORM5 or INLINEFORM6 is denoted by superscript and a time index is denoted by a subscript, i e  INLINEFORM7 indicates the hidden state at time INLINEFORM8 and layer INLINEFORM9   INLINEFORM10 means the element-wise multiplication between two vectors  We write INLINEFORM11 -th component of vector INLINEFORM12 as INLINEFORM13   All vectors are assumed to be column vectors 
Stacked LSTMs
While there exist various versions of LSTM formulation, in this work we use the following, one of the most common versions: DISPLAYFORM0 DISPLAYFORM1
where INLINEFORM0 , INLINEFORM1 , and INLINEFORM2 , INLINEFORM3 , INLINEFORM4 are trainable parameters  INLINEFORM5 and INLINEFORM6 are the sigmoid activation and the hyperbolic tangent activation function respectively  Also we assume that INLINEFORM7 where INLINEFORM8 is the INLINEFORM9 -th input to the network 
The input gate INLINEFORM0 and the forget gate INLINEFORM1 control the amount of information transmitted from INLINEFORM2 and INLINEFORM3 , the candidate cell state and the previous cell state, to the new cell state INLINEFORM4   Similarly the output gate INLINEFORM5 soft-selects which portion of the cell state INLINEFORM6 is to be used in the final hidden state 
We can clearly see that cell states ( INLINEFORM0 , INLINEFORM1 , INLINEFORM2 ) play a crucial role in forming horizontal recurrence  However the current formulation does not consider INLINEFORM3 , the cell state from INLINEFORM4 -th layer, in computation and thus the lower context is reflected only through the rudimentary way, hindering the possibility of controlling vertical information flow 
Cell-aware Stacked LSTMs
Now we extend the stacked LSTM formulation defined above to address the problem noted in the previous subsection  To enhance the interaction between layers in a way similar to how LSTMs keep and forget the information from the previous time step, we introduce the additional forget gate INLINEFORM0 that determines whether to accept or ignore the signals coming from the previous layer  Therefore the proposed Cell-aware Stacked LSTM is formulated as follows: DISPLAYFORM0 DISPLAYFORM1
where INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1   INLINEFORM2 can either be a vector of constants or parameters  When INLINEFORM3 , the equations defined in the previous subsection are used  Therefore, it can be said that each non-bottom layer of CAS-LSTM accepts two sets of hidden and cell states—one from the left context and the other from the below context  The left and the below context participate in computation with the equivalent procedure so that the information from lower layers can be efficiently propagated  Fig  FIGREF1 compares CAS-LSTM to the conventional stacked LSTM architecture, and Fig  FIGREF8 depicts the computation flow of the CAS-LSTM 
We argue that considering INLINEFORM0 in computation is beneficial for the following reasons  First, INLINEFORM1 contains additional information compared to INLINEFORM2 since it is not filtered by INLINEFORM3   Thus a model that directly uses INLINEFORM4 does not rely solely on INLINEFORM5 for extracting information, due to the fact that it has access to the raw information INLINEFORM6 , as in temporal connections  In other words, INLINEFORM7 no longer has to take all responsibility for selecting useful features for both horizontal and vertical transitions, and the burden of selecting information is shared with INLINEFORM8  
Another advantage of using the INLINEFORM0 lies in the fact that it directly connects INLINEFORM1 and INLINEFORM2   This direct connection helps and stabilizes training, since the terminal error signals can be easily backpropagated to model parameters  Fig  FIGREF23 illustrates paths between the two cell states 
We find experimentally that there is little difference between letting INLINEFORM0 be constant and letting it be trainable parameters, thus we set INLINEFORM1 in all experiments  We also experimented with the architecture without INLINEFORM2 i e  two cell states are combined by unweighted summation similar to multidimensional RNNs BIBREF27 , and found that it leads to performance degradation and unstable convergence, likely due to mismatch in the range of cell state values between layers ( INLINEFORM3 for the first layer and INLINEFORM4 for the others)  Experimental results on various INLINEFORM5 are presented in § SECREF3  
The idea of having multiple states is also related to tree-structured RNNs BIBREF29 , BIBREF30   Among them, tree-structured LSTMs (Tree-LSTMs) BIBREF31 , BIBREF32 , BIBREF33 are similar to ours in that they use both hidden and cell states from children nodes  In Tree-LSTMs, states for all children nodes are regarded as input, and they participate in the computation equally through weight-shared (in Child-Sum Tree-LSTMs) or weight-unshared (in INLINEFORM0 -ary Tree-LSTMs) projection  From this perspective, each CAS-LSTM layer (where INLINEFORM1 ) can be seen as a binary Tree-LSTM where the structures it operates on are fixed to right-branching trees  The use of cell state in computation could be one reason that Tree-LSTMs perform better than sequential LSTMs even when trivial trees (strictly left- or right-branching) are given BIBREF34  
Multidimensional RNNs (MDRNN) are an extension of 1D sequential RNNs that can accept multidimensional input e g  images, and have been successfully applied to image segmentation BIBREF26 and handwriting recognition BIBREF27   Notably multidimensional LSTMs (MDLSTM) BIBREF27 have an analogous formulation to ours except the INLINEFORM0 term and the fact that we use distinct weights per column (or `layer' in our case)  From this view, CAS-LSTM can be seen as a certain kind of MDLSTM that accepts a 2D input INLINEFORM1   Grid LSTMs BIBREF21 also take INLINEFORM2 inputs but emit INLINEFORM3 outputs, which is different from our case where a single set of hidden and cell states is produced 
Sentence Encoders
The sentence encoder network we use in our experiments takes INLINEFORM0 words (assumed to be one-hot vectors) as input  The words are projected to corresponding word representations: INLINEFORM1 where INLINEFORM2   Then INLINEFORM3 is fed to a INLINEFORM4 -layer CAS-LSTM model, resulting in the representations INLINEFORM5   The sentence representation, INLINEFORM6 , is computed by max-pooling INLINEFORM7 over time as in the work of BIBREF35   Similar to their results, from preliminary experiments we found that the max-pooling performs consistently better than mean- and last-pooling 
To make models more expressive, a bidirectional CAS-LSTM network may also be used  In the bidirectional case, the forward representations INLINEFORM0 and the backward representations INLINEFORM1 are concatenated and max-pooled to yield the sentence representation INLINEFORM2   We call this bidirectional architecture Bi-CAS-LSTM in experiments 
Top-layer Classifiers
For the natural language inference experiments, we use the following heuristic function proposed by BIBREF36 in feature extraction: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 means vector concatenation, and INLINEFORM1 and INLINEFORM2 are applied element-wise 
And we use the following function in paraphrase identification experiments: DISPLAYFORM0
as in the work of BIBREF37  
For sentiment classification, we use the sentence representation itself  DISPLAYFORM0
We feed the feature extracted from INLINEFORM0 as input to the MLP classifier with ReLU activation followed by the fully-connected softmax layer to predict the label distribution: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 , INLINEFORM1 is the number of label classes, and INLINEFORM2 the dimension of the MLP output,
Experiments
We evaluate our method on natural language inference (NLI), paraphrase identification (PI), and sentiment classification  We also conduct analysis on gate values and experiments on model variants  For detailed experimental settings, we refer readers to the supplemental material 
For the NLI and PI tasks, there exists recent work specializing in sentence pair classification  However in this work we confine our model to the architecture that encodes each sentence using a shared encoder without any inter-sentence interaction, in order to focus on the effectiveness of the models in extracting semantics  But note that the applicability of CAS-LSTM is not limited to sentence encoding based approaches 
Natural Language Inference
For the evaluation of performance of the proposed method on the NLI task, SNLI BIBREF22 and MultiNLI BIBREF23 datasets are used  The objective of both datasets is to predict the relationship between a premise and a hypothesis sentence: entailment, contradiction, and neutral  SNLI and MultiNLI datasets are composed of about 570k and 430k premise-hypothesis pairs respectively 
GloVe pretrained word embeddings BIBREF49 are used and remain fixed during training  The dimension of encoder states ( INLINEFORM0 ) is set to 300 and a 1024D MLP with one or two hidden layers is used  We apply dropout BIBREF50 to the word embeddings and the MLP layers  The features used as input to the MLP classifier are extracted following Eq  EQREF28  
Table TABREF32 and TABREF33 contain results of the models on SNLI and MultiNLI datasets  In SNLI, our best model achieves the new state-of-the-art accuracy of 87 0% with relatively fewer parameters  Similarly in MultiNLI, our models match the accuracy of state-of-the-art models in both in-domain (matched) and cross-domain (mismatched) test sets  Note that only the GloVe word vectors are used as word representations, as opposed to some models that introduce character-level features  It is also notable that our proposed architecture does not restrict the selection of pooling method; the performance could further be improved by replacing max-pooling with other advanced algorithms e g  intra-sentence attention BIBREF39 and generalized pooling BIBREF19  
Paraphrase Identification
We use Quora Question Pairs dataset BIBREF24 in evaluating the performance of our method on the PI task  The dataset consists of over 400k question pairs, and each pair is annotated with whether the two sentences are paraphrase of each other or not 
Similar to the NLI experiments, GloVe pretrained vectors, 300D encoders, and 1024D MLP are used  The number of CAS-LSTM layers is fixed to 2 in PI experiments  Two sentence vectors are aggregated using Eq  EQREF29 and fed as input to the MLP  The results on the Quora Question Pairs dataset are summarized in Table TABREF34   Again we can see that our models outperform other models by large margin, achieving the new state of the art 
Sentiment Classification
In evaluating sentiment classification performance, the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST) BIBREF25 is used  It consists of about 12,000 binary-parsed sentences where constituents (phrases) of each parse tree are annotated with a sentiment label (very positive, positive, neutral, negative, very negative)  Following the convention of prior work, all phrases and their labels are used in training but only the sentence-level data are used in evaluation 
In evaluation we consider two settings, namely SST-2 and SST-5, the two differing only in their level of granularity with regard to labels  In SST-2, data samples annotated with `neutral' are ignored from training and evaluation  The two positive labels (very positive, positive) are considered as the same label, and similarly for the two negative labels  As a result 98,794/872/1,821 data samples are used in training/validation/test, and the task is considered as a binary classification problem  In SST-5, data are used as-is and thus the task is a 5-class classification problem  All 318,582/1,101/2,210 data samples for training/validation/test are used in the SST-5 setting 
We use 300D GloVe vectors, 2-layer 150D or 300D encoders, and a 300D MLP classifier for the models, however unlike previous experiments we tune the word embeddings during training  The results on SST are listed in Table TABREF35   Our models achieve the new state-of-the-art accuracy on SST-2 and competitive accuracy on SST-5, without utilizing parse tree information 
Forget Gate Analysis
To inspect the effect of the additional forget gate, we investigate how the values of vertical forget gates are distributed  We sample 1,000 random sentences from the development set of the SNLI dataset, and use the 3-layer CAS-LSTM model trained on the SNLI dataset to compute gate values 
If all values from a vertical forget gate INLINEFORM0 were to be 0, this would mean that the introduction of the additional forget gate is meaningless and the model would reduce to a plain stacked LSTM  On the contrary if all values were 1, meaning that the vertical forget gates were always open, it would be impossible to say that the information is modulated effectively 
Fig  FIGREF40 and FIGREF40 represent histograms of the vertical forget gate values from the second and the third layer  From the figures we can validate that the trained model does not fall into the degenerate case where vertical forget gates are ignored  Also the figures show that the values are right-skewed, which we conjecture to be a result of focusing more on a strong interaction between adjacent layers 
To further verify that the gate values are diverse enough within each time step, we compute the distribution of the range of values per time step, INLINEFORM0 , where INLINEFORM1   We plot the histograms in Fig  FIGREF40 and FIGREF40   From the figure we see that a vertical forget gate controls the amount of information flow effectively, making the decision of retaining or discarding signals 
Finally, to investigate the argument presented in § SECREF2 that the additional forget gate helps the previous output gate with reducing the burden of extracting all needed information, we inspect the distribution of the values from INLINEFORM0   This distribution indicates how differently the vertical forget gate and the previous output gate select information from INLINEFORM1   From Fig  FIGREF40 and FIGREF40 we can see that the two gates make fairly different decisions, from which we demonstrate that the direct path between INLINEFORM2 and INLINEFORM3 enables a model to utilize signals overlooked by INLINEFORM4  
Model Variations
In this subsection, we see the influence of each component of a model on performance by removing or replacing its components  the SNLI dataset is used for experiments, and the best performing configuration is used as a baseline for modifications  We consider the following variants: (i) models that use plain stacked LSTMs, (ii) models with different INLINEFORM0 , (iii) models without INLINEFORM1 , and (iv) models that integrate lower contexts via peephole connections 
Variant (iv) integrates lower contexts via the following equations: DISPLAYFORM0 DISPLAYFORM1
where INLINEFORM0 represent peephole weights that take cell states into account  Among the above equations, those that use the lower cell state INLINEFORM1 are Eq  EQREF52 and EQREF55   We can see that INLINEFORM2 affects the value of INLINEFORM3 only via peephole connections, which makes INLINEFORM4 independent of INLINEFORM5  
Table TABREF36 summarizes the results of model variants  We can again see that the use of cell states clearly improves sentence modeling performance (baseline vs  (i) and (iv) vs  (i))  Also from the results of baseline and (ii), we validate that the selection of INLINEFORM0 does not significantly affect performance but introducing INLINEFORM1 is beneficial (baseline vs  (iii)) possibly due to its effect on normalizing information from multiple sources, as mentioned in § SECREF2   Finally, from the comparison between baseline and (iv), we show that the proposed way of combining the left and the lower contexts leads to better modeling of sentence representations than that of BIBREF20 in encoding sentences 
Conclusion
In this paper, we proposed a method of stacking multiple LSTM layers for modeling sentences, dubbed CAS-LSTM  It uses not only hidden states but also cell states from the previous layer, for the purpose of controlling the vertical information flow in a more elaborate way  We evaluated the proposed method on various benchmark tasks: natural language inference, paraphrase identification, and sentiment classification  Our models achieve the new state-of-the-art accuracy on SNLI and Quora Question Pairs datasets and obtain comparable results on MultiNLI and SST datasets  The proposed architecture can replace any stacked LSTM under one weak restriction—the size of states should be identical across all layers 
For future work we plan to apply the CAS-LSTM architecture beyond sentence modeling tasks  Various problems e g  sequence labeling, sequence generation, and language modeling might benefit from sophisticated modulation on context integration  Aggregating diverse contexts from sequential data, e g  those from forward and backward reading of text, could also be an intriguing research direction 
Acknowledgments
We thank Dan Edmiston for the review of the manuscript 

ground_truth: Stacked LSTMs, Cell-aware Stacked LSTMs, Sentence Encoders, Top-layer Classifiers