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. Who were the experts used for annotation?
Context 1: Introduction
Privacy policies are the documents which disclose the ways in which a company gathers, uses, shares and manages a user's data  As legal documents, they function using the principle of notice and choice BIBREF0, where companies post their policies, and theoretically, users read the policies and decide to use a company's products or services only if they find the conditions outlined in its privacy policy acceptable  Many legal jurisdictions around the world accept this framework, including the United States and the European Union BIBREF1, BIBREF2  However, the legitimacy of this framework depends upon users actually reading and understanding privacy policies to determine whether company practices are acceptable to them BIBREF3  In practice this is seldom the case BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10  This is further complicated by the highly individual and nuanced compromises that users are willing to make with their data BIBREF11, discouraging a `one-size-fits-all' approach to notice of data practices in privacy documents 
With devices constantly monitoring our environment, including our personal space and our bodies, lack of awareness of how our data is being used easily leads to problematic situations where users are outraged by information misuse, but companies insist that users have consented  The discovery of increasingly egregious uses of data by companies, such as the scandals involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica BIBREF12, have further brought public attention to the privacy concerns of the internet and ubiquitous computing  This makes privacy a well-motivated application domain for NLP researchers, where advances in enabling users to quickly identify the privacy issues most salient to them can potentially have large real-world impact 
[1]https://play google com/store/apps/details?id=com gotokeep keep intl [2]https://play google com/store/apps/details?id=com viber voip [3]A question might not have any supporting evidence for an answer within the privacy policy 
Motivated by this need, we contribute PrivacyQA, a corpus consisting of 1750 questions about the contents of privacy policies, paired with over 3500 expert annotations  The goal of this effort is to kickstart the development of question-answering methods for this domain, to address the (unrealistic) expectation that a large population should be reading many policies per day  In doing so, we identify several understudied challenges to our ability to answer these questions, with broad implications for systems seeking to serve users' information-seeking intent  By releasing this resource, we hope to provide an impetus to develop systems capable of language understanding in this increasingly important domain 
Related Work
Prior work has aimed to make privacy policies easier to understand  Prescriptive approaches towards communicating privacy information BIBREF21, BIBREF22, BIBREF23 have not been widely adopted by industry  Recently, there have been significant research effort devoted to understanding privacy policies by leveraging NLP techniques BIBREF24, BIBREF25, BIBREF26, BIBREF27, BIBREF28, especially by identifying specific data practices within a privacy policy  We adopt a personalized approach to understanding privacy policies, that allows users to query a document and selectively explore content salient to them  Most similar is the PolisisQA corpus BIBREF29, which examines questions users ask corporations on Twitter  Our approach differs in several ways: 1) The PrivacyQA dataset is larger, containing 10x as many questions and answers  2) Answers are formulated by domain experts with legal training  3) PrivacyQA includes diverse question types, including unanswerable and subjective questions 
Our work is also related to reading comprehension in the open domain, which is frequently based upon Wikipedia passages BIBREF16, BIBREF17, BIBREF15, BIBREF30 and news articles BIBREF20, BIBREF31, BIBREF32  Table TABREF4 presents the desirable attributes our dataset shares with past approaches  This work is also tied into research in applying NLP approaches to legal documents BIBREF33, BIBREF34, BIBREF35, BIBREF36, BIBREF37, BIBREF38, BIBREF39  While privacy policies have legal implications, their intended audience consists of the general public rather than individuals with legal expertise  This arrangement is problematic because the entities that write privacy policies often have different goals than the audience  feng2015applying, tan-EtAl:2016:P16-1 examine question answering in the insurance domain, another specialized domain similar to privacy, where the intended audience is the general public 
Data Collection
We describe the data collection methodology used to construct PrivacyQA  With the goal of achieving broad coverage across application types, we collect privacy policies from 35 mobile applications representing a number of different categories in the Google Play Store  One of our goals is to include both policies from well-known applications, which are likely to have carefully-constructed privacy policies, and lesser-known applications with smaller install bases, whose policies might be considerably less sophisticated  Thus, setting 5 million installs as a threshold, we ensure each category includes applications with installs on both sides of this threshold  All policies included in the corpus are in English, and were collected before April 1, 2018, predating many companies' GDPR-focused BIBREF41 updates  We leave it to future studies BIBREF42 to look at the impact of the GDPR (e g , to what extent GDPR requirements contribute to making it possible to provide users with more informative answers, and to what extent their disclosures continue to omit issues that matter to users) 
Data Collection ::: Crowdsourced Question Elicitation
The intended audience for privacy policies consists of the general public  This informs the decision to elicit questions from crowdworkers on the contents of privacy policies  We choose not to show the contents of privacy policies to crowdworkers, a procedure motivated by a desire to avoid inadvertent biases BIBREF43, BIBREF44, BIBREF45, BIBREF46, BIBREF47, and encourage crowdworkers to ask a variety of questions beyond only asking questions based on practices described in the document 
Instead, crowdworkers are presented with public information about a mobile application available on the Google Play Store including its name, description and navigable screenshots  Figure FIGREF9 shows an example of our user interface  Crowdworkers are asked to imagine they have access to a trusted third-party privacy assistant, to whom they can ask any privacy question about a given mobile application  We use the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform and recruit crowdworkers who have been conferred “master” status and are located within the United States of America  Turkers are asked to provide five questions per mobile application, and are paid $2 per assignment, taking ~eight minutes to complete the task 
Data Collection ::: Answer Selection
To identify legally sound answers, we recruit seven experts with legal training to construct answers to Turker questions  Experts identify relevant evidence within the privacy policy, as well as provide meta-annotation on the question's relevance, subjectivity, OPP-115 category BIBREF49, and how likely any privacy policy is to contain the answer to the question asked 
Data Collection ::: Analysis
Table TABREF17 presents aggregate statistics of the PrivacyQA dataset  1750 questions are posed to our imaginary privacy assistant over 35 mobile applications and their associated privacy documents  As an initial step, we formulate the problem of answering user questions as an extractive sentence selection task, ignoring for now background knowledge, statistical data and legal expertise that could otherwise be brought to bear  The dataset is partitioned into a training set featuring 27 mobile applications and 1350 questions, and a test set consisting of 400 questions over 8 policy documents  This ensures that documents in training and test splits are mutually exclusive  Every question is answered by at least one expert  In addition, in order to estimate annotation reliability and provide for better evaluation, every question in the test set is answered by at least two additional experts 
Table TABREF14 describes the distribution over first words of questions posed by crowdworkers  We also observe low redundancy in the questions posed by crowdworkers over each policy, with each policy receiving ~49 94 unique questions despite crowdworkers independently posing questions  Questions are on average 8 4 words long  As declining to answer a question can be a legally sound response but is seldom practically useful, answers to questions where a minority of experts abstain to answer are filtered from the dataset  Privacy policies are ~3000 words long on average  The answers to the question asked by the users typically have ~100 words of evidence in the privacy policy document 
Data Collection ::: Analysis ::: Categories of Questions
Questions are organized under nine categories from the OPP-115 Corpus annotation scheme BIBREF49:
First Party Collection/Use: What, why and how information is collected by the service provider
Third Party Sharing/Collection: What, why and how information shared with or collected by third parties
Data Security: Protection measures for user information
Data Retention: How long user information will be stored
User Choice/Control: Control options available to users
User Access, Edit and Deletion: If/how users can access, edit or delete information
Policy Change: Informing users if policy information has been changed
International and Specific Audiences: Practices pertaining to a specific group of users
Other: General text, contact information or practices not covered by other categories 
For each question, domain experts indicate one or more relevant OPP-115 categories  We mark a category as relevant to a question if it is identified as such by at least two annotators  If no such category exists, the category is marked as `Other' if atleast one annotator has identified the `Other' category to be relevant  If neither of these conditions is satisfied, we label the question as having no agreement  The distribution of questions in the corpus across OPP-115 categories is as shown in Table TABREF16  First party and third party related questions are the largest categories, forming nearly 66 4% of all questions asked to the privacy assistant 
Data Collection ::: Analysis ::: Answer Validation
When do experts disagree? We would like to analyze the reasons for potential disagreement on the annotation task, to ensure disagreements arise due to valid differences in opinion rather than lack of adequate specification in annotation guidelines  It is important to note that the annotators are experts rather than crowdworkers  Accordingly, their judgements can be considered valid, legally-informed opinions even when their perspectives differ  For the sake of this question we randomly sample 100 instances in the test data and analyze them for likely reasons for disagreements  We consider a disagreement to have occurred when more than one expert does not agree with the majority consensus  By disagreement we mean there is no overlap between the text identified as relevant by one expert and another 
We find that the annotators agree on the answer for 74% of the questions, even if the supporting evidence they identify is not identical i e full overlap  They disagree on the remaining 26%  Sources of apparent disagreement correspond to situations when different experts: have differing interpretations of question intent (11%) (for example, when a user asks 'who can contact me through the app', the questions admits multiple interpretations, including seeking information about the features of the app, asking about first party collection/use of data or asking about third party collection/use of data), identify different sources of evidence for questions that ask if a practice is performed or not (4%), have differing interpretations of policy content (3%), identify a partial answer to a question in the privacy policy (2%) (for example, when the user asks `who is allowed to use the app' a majority of our annotators decline to answer, but the remaining annotators highlight partial evidence in the privacy policy which states that children under the age of 13 are not allowed to use the app), and other legitimate sources of disagreement (6%) which include personal subjective views of the annotators (for example, when the user asks `is my DNA information used in any way other than what is specified', some experts consider the boilerplate text of the privacy policy which states that it abides to practices described in the policy document as sufficient evidence to answer this question, whereas others do not) 
Experimental Setup
We evaluate the ability of machine learning methods to identify relevant evidence for questions in the privacy domain  We establish baselines for the subtask of deciding on the answerability (§SECREF33) of a question, as well as the overall task of identifying evidence for questions from policies (§SECREF37)  We describe aspects of the question that can render it unanswerable within the privacy domain (§SECREF41) 
Experimental Setup ::: Answerability Identification Baselines
We define answerability identification as a binary classification task, evaluating model ability to predict if a question can be answered, given a question in isolation  This can serve as a prior for downstream question-answering  We describe three baselines on the answerability task, and find they considerably improve performance over a majority-class baseline 
SVM: We define 3 sets of features to characterize each question  The first is a simple bag-of-words set of features over the question (SVM-BOW), the second is bag-of-words features of the question as well as length of the question in words (SVM-BOW + LEN), and lastly we extract bag-of-words features, length of the question in words as well as part-of-speech tags for the question (SVM-BOW + LEN + POS)  This results in vectors of 200, 201 and 228 dimensions respectively, which are provided to an SVM with a linear kernel 
CNN: We utilize a CNN neural encoder for answerability prediction  We use GloVe word embeddings BIBREF50, and a filter size of 5 with 64 filters to encode questions 
BERT: BERT BIBREF51 is a bidirectional transformer-based language-model BIBREF52  We fine-tune BERT-base on our binary answerability identification task with a learning rate of 2e-5 for 3 epochs, with a maximum sequence length of 128 
Experimental Setup ::: Privacy Question Answering
Our goal is to identify evidence within a privacy policy for questions asked by a user  This is framed as an answer sentence selection task, where models identify a set of evidence sentences from all candidate sentences in each policy 
Experimental Setup ::: Privacy Question Answering ::: Evaluation Metric
Our evaluation metric for answer-sentence selection is sentence-level F1, implemented similar to BIBREF30, BIBREF16  Precision and recall are implemented by measuring the overlap between predicted sentences and sets of gold-reference sentences  We report the average of the maximum F1 from each n$-$1 subset, in relation to the heldout reference 
Experimental Setup ::: Privacy Question Answering ::: Baselines
We describe baselines on this task, including a human performance baseline 
No-Answer Baseline (NA) : Most of the questions we receive are difficult to answer in a legally-sound way on the basis of information present in the privacy policy  We establish a simple baseline to quantify the effect of identifying every question as unanswerable 
Word Count Baseline : To quantify the effect of using simple lexical matching to answer the questions, we retrieve the top candidate policy sentences for each question using a word count baseline BIBREF53, which counts the number of question words that also appear in a sentence  We include the top 2, 3 and 5 candidates as baselines 
BERT: We implement two BERT-based baselines BIBREF51 for evidence identification  First, we train BERT on each query-policy sentence pair as a binary classification task to identify if the sentence is evidence for the question or not (Bert)  We also experiment with a two-stage classifier, where we separately train the model on questions only to predict answerability  At inference time, if the answerable classifier predicts the question is answerable, the evidence identification classifier produces a set of candidate sentences (Bert + Unanswerable) 
Human Performance: We pick each reference answer provided by an annotator, and compute the F1 with respect to the remaining references, as described in section 4 2 1  Each reference answer is treated as the prediction, and the remaining n-1 answers are treated as the gold reference  The average of the maximum F1 across all reference answers is computed as the human baseline 
Results and Discussion
The results of the answerability baselines are presented in Table TABREF31, and on answer sentence selection in Table TABREF32  We observe that bert exhibits the best performance on a binary answerability identification task  However, most baselines considerably exceed the performance of a majority-class baseline  This suggests considerable information in the question, indicating it's possible answerability within this domain 
Table TABREF32 describes the performance of our baselines on the answer sentence selection task  The No-answer (NA) baseline performs at 28 F1, providing a lower bound on performance at this task  We observe that our best-performing baseline, Bert + Unanswerable achieves an F1 of 39 8  This suggest that bert is capable of making some progress towards answering questions in this difficult domain, while still leaving considerable headroom for improvement to reach human performance  Bert + Unanswerable performance suggests that incorporating information about answerability can help in this difficult domain  We examine this challenging phenomena of unanswerability further in Section  
Results and Discussion ::: Error Analysis
Disagreements are analyzed based on the OPP-115 categories of each question (Table TABREF34)  We compare our best performing BERT variant against the NA model and human performance  We observe significant room for improvement across all categories of questions but especially for first party, third party and data retention categories 
We analyze the performance of our strongest BERT variant, to identify classes of errors and directions for future improvement (Table 8)  We observe that a majority of answerability mistakes made by the BERT model are questions which are in fact answerable, but are identified as unanswerable by BERT  We observe that BERT makes 124 such mistakes on the test set  We collect expert judgments on relevance, subjectivity , silence and information about how likely the question is to be answered from the privacy policy from our experts  We find that most of these mistakes are relevant questions  However many of them were identified as subjective by the annotators, and at least one annotator marked 19 of these questions as having no answer within the privacy policy  However, only 6 of these questions were unexpected or do not usually have an answer in privacy policies  These findings suggest that a more nuanced understanding of answerability might help improve model performance in his challenging domain 
Results and Discussion ::: What makes Questions Unanswerable?
We further ask legal experts to identify potential causes of unanswerability of questions  This analysis has considerable implications  While past work BIBREF17 has treated unanswerable questions as homogeneous, a question answering system might wish to have different treatments for different categories of `unanswerable' questions  The following factors were identified to play a role in unanswerability:
Incomprehensibility: If a question is incomprehensible to the extent that its meaning is not intelligible 
Relevance: Is this question in the scope of what could be answered by reading the privacy policy 
Ill-formedness: Is this question ambiguous or vague  An ambiguous statement will typically contain expressions that can refer to multiple potential explanations, whereas a vague statement carries a concept with an unclear or soft definition 
Silence: Other policies answer this type of question but this one does not 
Atypicality: The question is of a nature such that it is unlikely for any policy policy to have an answer to the question 
Our experts attempt to identify the different `unanswerable' factors for all 573 such questions in the corpus  4 18% of the questions were identified as being incomprehensible (for example, `any difficulties to occupy the privacy assistant')  Amongst the comprehendable questions, 50% were identified as likely to have an answer within the privacy policy, 33 1% were identified as being privacy-related questions but not within the scope of a privacy policy (e g , 'has Viber had any privacy breaches in the past?') and 16 9% of questions were identified as completely out-of-scope (e g , `'will the app consume much space?')  In the questions identified as relevant, 32% were ill-formed questions that were phrased by the user in a manner considered vague or ambiguous  Of the questions that were both relevant as well as `well-formed', 95 7% of the questions were not answered by the policy in question but it was reasonable to expect that a privacy policy would contain an answer  The remaining 4 3% were described as reasonable questions, but of a nature generally not discussed in privacy policies  This suggests that the answerability of questions over privacy policies is a complex issue, and future systems should consider each of these factors when serving user's information seeking intent 
We examine a large-scale dataset of “natural” unanswerable questions BIBREF54 based on real user search engine queries to identify if similar unanswerability factors exist  It is important to note that these questions have previously been filtered, according to a criteria for bad questions defined as “(questions that are) ambiguous, incomprehensible, dependent on clear false presuppositions, opinion-seeking, or not clearly a request for factual information ” Annotators made the decision based on the content of the question without viewing the equivalent Wikipedia page  We randomly sample 100 questions from the development set which were identified as unanswerable, and find that 20% of the questions are not questions (e g , “all I want for christmas is you mariah carey tour”)  12% of questions are unlikely to ever contain an answer on Wikipedia, corresponding closely to our atypicality category  3% of questions are unlikely to have an answer anywhere (e g , `what guides Santa home after he has delivered presents?')  7% of questions are incomplete or open-ended (e g , `the south west wind blows across nigeria between')  3% of questions have an unresolvable coreference (e g , `how do i get to Warsaw Missouri from here')  4% of questions are vague, and a further 7% have unknown sources of error  2% still contain false presuppositions (e g , `what is the only fruit that does not have seeds?') and the remaining 42% do not have an answer within the document  This reinforces our belief that though they have been understudied in past work, any question answering system interacting with real users should expect to receive such unanticipated and unanswerable questions 
Conclusion
We present PrivacyQA, the first significant corpus of privacy policy questions and more than 3500 expert annotations of relevant answers  The goal of this work is to promote question-answering research in the specialized privacy domain, where it can have large real-world impact  Strong neural baselines on PrivacyQA achieve a performance of only 39 8 F1 on this corpus, indicating considerable room for future research  Further, we shed light on several important considerations that affect the answerability of questions  We hope this contribution leads to multidisciplinary efforts to precisely understand user intent and reconcile it with information in policy documents, from both the privacy and NLP communities 
Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation Secure and Trustworthy Computing program (CNS-1330596, CNS-1330214, CNS-15-13957, CNS-1801316, CNS-1914486, CNS-1914444) and a DARPA Brandeis grant on Personalized Privacy Assistants (FA8750-15-2-0277)  The US Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes not withstanding any copyright notation  The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the NSF, DARPA, or the US Government  The authors would like to extend their gratitude to Elias Wright, Gian Mascioli, Kiara Pillay, Harrison Kay, Eliel Talo, Alexander Fagella and N  Cameron Russell for providing their valuable expertise and insight to this effort  The authors are also grateful to Eduard Hovy, Lorrie Cranor, Florian Schaub, Joel Reidenberg, Aditya Potukuchi and Igor Shalyminov for helpful discussions related to this work, and to the three anonymous reviewers of this draft for their constructive feedback  Finally, the authors would like to thank all crowdworkers who consented to participate in this study 
Context 2: Introduction
Nowadays deep learning techniques outperform the other conventional methods in most of the speech-related tasks  Training robust deep neural networks for each task depends on the availability of powerful processing GPUs, as well as standard and large scale datasets  In text-independent speaker verification, large-scale datasets are available, thanks to the NIST SRE evaluations and other data collection projects such as VoxCeleb BIBREF0 
In text-dependent speaker recognition, experiments with end-to-end architectures conducted on large proprietary databases have demonstrated their superiority over traditional approaches BIBREF1  Yet, contrary to text-independent speaker recognition, text-dependent speaker recognition lacks large-scale publicly available databases  The two most well-known datasets are probably RSR2015 BIBREF2 and RedDots BIBREF3  The former contains speech data collected from 300 individuals in a controlled manner, while the latter is used primarily for evaluation rather than training, due to its small number of speakers (only 64)  Motivated by this lack of large-scale dataset for text-dependent speaker verification, we chose to proceed with the collection of the DeepMine dataset, which we expect to become a standard benchmark for the task 
Apart from speaker recognition, large amounts of training data are required also for training automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems  Such datasets should not only be large in size, they should also be characterized by high variability with respect to speakers, age and dialects  While several datasets with these properties are available for languages like English, Mandarin, French, this is not the case for several other languages, such as Persian  To this end, we proceeded with collecting a large-scale dataset, suitable for building robust ASR models in Persian 
The main goal of the DeepMine project was to collect speech from at least a few thousand speakers, enabling research and development of deep learning methods  The project started at the beginning of 2017, and after designing the database and the developing Android and server applications, the data collection began in the middle of 2017  The project finished at the end of 2018 and the cleaned-up and final version of the database was released at the beginning of 2019  In BIBREF4, the running project and its data collection scenarios were described, alongside with some preliminary results and statistics  In this paper, we announce the final and cleaned-up version of the database, describe its different parts and provide various evaluation setups for each part  Finally, since the database was designed mainly for text-dependent speaker verification purposes, some baseline results are reported for this task on the official evaluation setups  Additional baseline results are also reported for Persian speech recognition  However, due to the space limitation in this paper, the baseline results are not reported for all the database parts and conditions  They will be defined and reported in the database technical documentation and in a future journal paper 
Data Collection
DeepMine is publicly available for everybody with a variety of licenses for different users  It was collected using crowdsourcing BIBREF4  The data collection was done using an Android application  Each respondent installed the application on his/her personal device and recorded several phrases in different sessions  The Android application did various checks on each utterance and if it passed all of them, the respondent was directed to the next phrase  For more information about data collection scenario, please refer to BIBREF4 
Data Collection ::: Post-Processing
In order to clean-up the database, the main post-processing step was to filter out problematic utterances  Possible problems include speaker word insertions (e g  repeating some part of a phrase), deletions, substitutions, and involuntary disfluencies  To detect these, we implemented an alignment stage, similar to the second alignment stage in the LibriSpeech project BIBREF5  In this method, a custom decoding graph was generated for each phrase  The decoding graph allows for word skipping and word insertion in the phrase 
For text-dependent and text-prompted parts of the database, such errors are not allowed  Hence, any utterances with errors were removed from the enrollment and test lists  For the speech recognition part, a sub-part of the utterance which is correctly aligned to the corresponding transcription is kept  After the cleaning step, around 190 thousand utterances with full transcription and 10 thousand with sub-part alignment have remained in the database 
Data Collection ::: Statistics
After processing the database and removing problematic respondents and utterances, 1969 respondents remained in the database, with 1149 of them being male and 820 female  297 of the respondents could not read English and have therefore read only the Persian prompts  About 13200 sessions were recorded by females and similarly, about 9500 sessions by males, i e  women are over-represented in terms of sessions, even though their number is 17% smaller than that of males  Other useful statistics related to the database are shown in Table TABREF4 
The last status of the database, as well as other related and useful information about its availability can be found on its website, together with a limited number of samples 
DeepMine Database Parts
The DeepMine database consists of three parts  The first one contains fixed common phrases to perform text-dependent speaker verification  The second part consists of random sequences of words useful for text-prompted speaker verification, and the last part includes phrases with word- and phoneme-level transcription, useful for text-independent speaker verification using a random phrase (similar to Part4 of RedDots)  This part can also serve for Persian ASR training  Each part is described in more details below  Table TABREF11 shows the number of unique phrases in each part of the database  For the English text-dependent part, the following phrases were selected from part1 of the RedDots database, hence the RedDots can be used as an additional training set for this part:
“My voice is my password ”
“OK Google ”
“Artificial intelligence is for real ”
“Actions speak louder than words ”
“There is no such thing as a free lunch ”
DeepMine Database Parts ::: Part1 - Text-dependent (TD)
This part contains a set of fixed phrases which are used to verify speakers in text-dependent mode  Each speaker utters 5 Persian phrases, and if the speaker can read English, 5 phrases selected from Part1 of the RedDots database are also recorded 
We have created three experimental setups with different numbers of speakers in the evaluation set  For each setup, speakers with more recording sessions are included in the evaluation set and the rest of the speakers are used for training in the background set (in the database, all background sets are basically training data)  The rows in Table TABREF13 corresponds to the different experimental setups and shows the numbers of speakers in each set  Note that, for English, we have filtered the (Persian native) speakers by the ability to read English  Therefore, there are fewer speakers in each set for English than for Persian  There is a small “dev” set in each setup which can be used for parameter tuning to prevent over-tuning on the evaluation set 
For each experimental setup, we have defined several official trial lists with different numbers of enrollment utterances per trial in order to investigate the effects of having different amounts of enrollment data  All trials in one trial list have the same number of enrollment utterances (3 to 6) and only one test utterance  All enrollment utterances in a trial are taken from different consecutive sessions and the test utterance is taken from yet another session  From all the setups and conditions, the 100-spk with 3-session enrollment (3-sess) is considered as the main evaluation condition  In Table TABREF14, the number of trials for Persian 3-sess are shown for the different types of trial in the text-dependent speaker verification (SV)  Note that for Imposter-Wrong (IW) trials (i e  imposter speaker pronouncing wrong phrase), we merely create one wrong trial for each Imposter-Correct (IC) trial to limit the huge number of possible trials for this case  So, the number of trials for IC and IW cases are the same 
DeepMine Database Parts ::: Part2 - Text-prompted (TP)
For this part, in each session, 3 random sequences of Persian month names are shown to the respondent in two modes: In the first mode, the sequence consists of all 12 months, which will be used for speaker enrollment  The second mode contains a sequence of 3 month names that will be used as a test utterance  In each 8 sessions received by a respondent from the server, there are 3 enrollment phrases of all 12 months (all in just one session), and $7 \times 3$ other test phrases, containing fewer words  For a respondent who can read English, 3 random sequences of English digits are also recorded in each session  In one of the sessions, these sequences contain all digits and the remaining ones contain only 4 digits 
Similar to the text-dependent case, three experimental setups with different number of speaker in the evaluation set are defined (corresponding to the rows in Table TABREF16)  However, different strategy is used for defining trials: Depending on the enrollment condition (1- to 3-sess), trials are enrolled on utterances of all words from 1 to 3 different sessions (i e  3 to 9 utterances)  Further, we consider two conditions for test utterances: seq test utterance with only 3 or 4 words and full test utterances with all words (i e  same words as in enrollment but in different order)  From all setups an all conditions, the 100-spk with 1-session enrolment (1-sess) is considered as the main evaluation condition for the text-prompted case  In Table TABREF16, the numbers of trials (sum for both seq and full conditions) for Persian 1-sess are shown for the different types of trials in the text-prompted SV  Again, we just create one IW trial for each IC trial 
DeepMine Database Parts ::: Part3 - Text-independent (TI)
In this part, 8 Persian phrases that have already been transcribed on the phone level are displayed to the respondent  These phrases are chosen mostly from news and Persian Wikipedia  If the respondent is unable to read English, instead of 5 fixed phrases and 3 random digit strings, 8 other Persian phrases are also prompted to the respondent to have exactly 24 phrases in each recording session 
This part can be useful at least for three potential applications  First, it can be used for text-independent speaker verification  The second application of this part (same as Part4 of RedDots) is text-prompted speaker verification using random text (instead of a random sequence of words)  Finally, the third application is large vocabulary speech recognition in Persian (explained in the next sub-section) 
Based on the recording sessions, we created two experimental setups for speaker verification  In the first one, respondents with at least 17 recording sessions are included to the evaluation set, respondents with 16 sessions to the development and the rest of respondents to the background set (can be used as training data)  In the second setup, respondents with at least 8 sessions are included to the evaluation set, respondents with 6 or 7 sessions to the development and the rest of respondents to the background set  Table TABREF18 shows numbers of speakers in each set of the database for text-independent SV case 
For text-independent SV, we have considered 4 scenarios for enrollment and 4 scenarios for test  The speaker can be enrolled using utterances from 1, 2 or 3 consecutive sessions (1sess to 3sess) or using 8 utterances from 8 different sessions  The test speech can be one utterance (1utt) for short duration scenario or all utterances in one session (1sess) for long duration case  In addition, test speech can be selected from 5 English phrases for cross-language testing (enrollment using Persian utterances and test using English utterances)
Context 3: Introduction
Explanations of happenings in one's life, causal explanations, are an important topic of study in social, psychological, economic, and behavioral sciences  For example, psychologists have analyzed people's causal explanatory style BIBREF0 and found strong negative relationships with depression, passivity, and hostility, as well as positive relationships with life satisfaction, quality of life, and length of life BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF0  
To help understand the significance of causal explanations, consider how they are applied to measuring optimism (and its converse, pessimism) BIBREF0   For example, in “My parser failed because I always have bugs ”, the emphasized text span is considered a causal explanation which indicates pessimistic personality – a negative event where the author believes the cause is pervasive  However, in “My parser failed because I barely worked on the code ”, the explanation would be considered a signal of optimistic personality – a negative event for which the cause is believed to be short-lived 
Language-based models which can detect causal explanations from everyday social media language can be used for more than automating optimism detection  Language-based assessments would enable other large-scale downstream tasks: tracking prevailing causal beliefs (e g , about climate change or autism), better extracting process knowledge from non-fiction (e g , gravity causes objects to move toward one another), or detecting attribution of blame or praise in product or service reviews (“I loved this restaurant because the fish was cooked to perfection”) 
In this paper, we introduce causal explanation analysis and its subtasks of detecting the presence of causality (causality prediction) and identifying explanatory phrases (causal explanation identification)  There are many challenges to achieving these task  First, the ungrammatical texts in social media incur poor syntactic parsing results which drastically affect the performance of discourse relation parsing pipelines   Many causal relations are implicit and do not contain any discourse markers (e g , `because')  Further, Explicit causal relations are also more difficult in social media due to the abundance of abbreviations and variations of discourse connectives (e g , `cuz' and `bcuz') 
Prevailing approaches for social media analyses, utilizing traditional linear models or bag of words models (e g , SVM trained with n-gram, part-of-speech (POS) tags, or lexicon-based features) alone do not seem appropriate for this task since they simply cannot segment the text into meaningful discourse units or discourse arguments such as clauses or sentences rather than random consecutive token sequences or specific word tokens  Even when the discourse units are clear, parsers may still fail to accurately identify discourse relations since the content of social media is quite different than that of newswire which is typically used for discourse parsing 
In order to overcome these difficulties of discourse relation parsing in social media, we simplify and minimize the use of syntactic parsing results and capture relations between discourse arguments, and investigate the use of a recursive neural network model (RNN)  Recent work has shown that RNNs are effective for utilizing discourse structures for their downstream tasks BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , but they have yet to be directly used for discourse relation prediction in social media  We evaluated our model by comparing it to off-the-shelf end-to-end discourse relation parsers and traditional models  We found that the SVM and random forest classifiers work better than the LSTM classifier for the causality detection, while the LSTM classifier outperforms other models for identifying causal explanation 
The contributions of this work include: (1) the proposal of models for both (a) causality prediction and (b) causal explanation identification, (2) the extensive evaluation of a variety of models from social media classification models and discourse relation parsers to RNN-based application models, demonstrating that feature-based models work best for causality prediction while RNNs are superior for the more difficult task of causal explanation identification, (3) performance analysis on architectural differences of the pipeline and the classifier structures, (4) exploration of the applications of causal explanation to downstream tasks, and (5) release of a novel, anonymized causality Facebook dataset along with our causality prediction and causal explanation identification models 
Related Work
Identifying causal explanations in documents can be viewed as discourse relation parsing  The Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) BIBREF7 has a `Cause' and `Pragmatic Cause' discourse type under a general `Contingency' class and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) BIBREF8 has a `Relations of Cause'  In most cases, the development of discourse parsers has taken place in-domain, where researchers have used the existing annotations of discourse arguments in newswire text (e g  Wall Street Journal) from the discourse treebank and focused on exploring different features and optimizing various types of models for predicting relations BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11   In order to further develop automated systems, researchers have proposed end-to-end discourse relation parsers, building models which are trained and evaluated on the annotated PDTB and RST Discourse Treebank (RST DT)  These corpora consist of documents from Wall Street Journal (WSJ) which are much more well-organized and grammatical than social media texts BIBREF12 , BIBREF13 , BIBREF14 , BIBREF15  
Only a few works have attempted to parse discourse relations for out-of-domain problems such as text categorizations on social media texts; Ji and Bhatia used models which are pretrained with RST DT for building discourse structures from movie reviews, and Son adapted the PDTB discourse relation parsing approach for capturing counterfactual conditionals from tweets BIBREF4 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF16   These works had substantial differences to what propose in this paper  First, Ji and Bhatia used a pretrained model (not fully optimal for some parts of the given task) in their pipeline; Ji's model performed worse than the baseline on the categorization of legislative bills, which is thought to be due to legislative discourse structures differing from those of the training set (WSJ corpus)  Bhatia also used a pretrained model finding that utilizing discourse relation features did not boost accuracy BIBREF4 , BIBREF3   Both Bhatia and Son used manual schemes which may limit the coverage of certain types of positive samples– Bhatia used a hand-crafted schema for weighting discourse structures for the neural network model and Son manually developed seven surface forms of counterfactual thinking for the rule-based system BIBREF4 , BIBREF16   We use social-media-specific features from pretrained models which are directly trained on tweets and we avoid any hand-crafted rules except for those included in the existing discourse argument extraction techniques 
The automated systems for discourse relation parsing involve multiple subtasks from segmenting the whole text into discourse arguments to classifying discourse relations between the arguments  Past research has found that different types of models and features yield varying performance for each subtask  Some have optimized models for discourse relation classification (i e  given a document indicating if the relation existing) without discourse argument parsing using models such as Naive-Bayes or SVMs, achieve relatively stronger accuracies but a simpler task than that associated with discourse arguments BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF9   Researchers who, instead, tried to build the end-to-end parsing pipelines considered a wider range of approaches including sequence models and RNNs BIBREF12 , BIBREF15 , BIBREF14 , BIBREF17   Particularly, when they tried to utilize the discourse structures for out-domain applications, they used RNN-based models and found that those models are advantageous for their downstream tasks BIBREF4 , BIBREF3  
In our case, for identifying causal explanations from social media using discourse structure, we build an RNN-based model for its structural effectiveness in this task (see details in section UID13 )  However, we also note that simpler models such as SVMs and logistic regression obtained the state-of-the-art performances for text categorization tasks in social media BIBREF18 , BIBREF19 , so we build relatively simple models with different properties for each stage of the full pipeline of our parser 
Methods
We build our model based on PDTB-style discourse relation parsing since PDTB has a relatively simpler text segmentation method; for explicit discourse relations, it finds the presence of discourse connectives within a document and extracts discourse arguments which parametrize the connective while for implicit relations, it considers all adjacent sentences as candidate discourse arguments 
Dataset
We created our own causal explanation dataset by collecting 3,268 random Facebook status update messages  Three well-trained annotators manually labeled whether or not each message contains the causal explanation and obtained 1,598 causality messages with substantial agreement ( $\kappa =0 61$ )  We used the majority vote for our gold standard  Then, on each causality message, annotators identified which text spans are causal explanations 
For each task, we used 80% of the dataset for training our model and 10% for tuning the hyperparameters of our models

ground_truth: Individuals with legal training

Yes

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 accents are present in the corpus?
Context 2:  From all setups, 1sess-1utt and 1sess-1sess for 438-spk set are considered as the main evaluation setups for text-independent case  Table TABREF19 shows number of trials for these setups 
For text-prompted SV with random text, the same setup as text-independent case together with corresponding utterance transcriptions can be used 
DeepMine Database Parts ::: Part3 - Speech Recognition
As explained before, Part3 of the DeepMine database can be used for Persian read speech recognition  There are only a few databases for speech recognition in Persian BIBREF6, BIBREF7  Hence, this part can at least partly address this problem and enable robust speech recognition applications in Persian  Additionally, it can be used for speaker recognition applications, such as training deep neural networks (DNNs) for extracting bottleneck features BIBREF8, or for collecting sufficient statistics using DNNs for i-vector training 
We have randomly selected 50 speakers (25 for each gender) from the all speakers in the database which have net speech (without silence parts) between 25 minutes to 50 minutes as test speakers  For each speaker, the utterances in the first 5 sessions are included to (small) test-set and the other utterances of test speakers are considered as a large-test-set  The remaining utterances of the other speakers are included in the training set  The test-set, large-test-set and train-set contain 5 9, 28 5 and 450 hours of speech respectively 
There are about 8300 utterances in Part3 which contain only Persian full names (i e  first and family name pairs)  Each phrase consists of several full names and their phoneme transcriptions were extracted automatically using a trained Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P)  These utterances can be used to evaluate the performance of a systems for name recognition, which is usually more difficult than the normal speech recognition because of the lack of a reliable language model 
Experiments and Results
Due to the space limitation, we present results only for the Persian text-dependent speaker verification and speech recognition 
Experiments and Results ::: Speaker Verification Experiments
We conducted an experiment on text-dependent speaker verification part of the database, using the i-vector based method proposed in BIBREF9, BIBREF10 and applied it to the Persian portion of Part1  In this experiment, 20-dimensional MFCC features along with first and second derivatives are extracted from 16 kHz signals using HTK BIBREF11 with 25 ms Hamming windowed frames with 15 ms overlap 
The reported results are obtained with a 400-dimensional gender independent i-vector based system  The i-vectors are first length-normalized and are further normalized using phrase- and gender-dependent Regularized Within-Class Covariance Normalization (RWCCN) BIBREF10  Cosine distance is used to obtain speaker verification scores and phrase- and gender-dependent s-norm is used for normalizing the scores  For aligning speech frames to Gaussian components, monophone HMMs with 3 states and 8 Gaussian components in each state are used BIBREF10  We only model the phonemes which appear in the 5 Persian text-dependent phrases 
For speaker verification experiments, the results were reported in terms of Equal Error Rate (EER) and Normalized Detection Cost Function as defined for NIST SRE08 ($\mathrm {NDCF_{0 01}^{min}}$) and NIST SRE10 ($\mathrm {NDCF_{0 001}^{min}}$)  As shown in Table TABREF22, in text-dependent SV there are 4 types of trials: Target-Correct and Imposter-Correct refer to trials when the pass-phrase is uttered correctly by target and imposter speakers respectively, and in same manner, Target-Wrong and Imposter-Wrong refer to trials when speakers uttered a wrong pass-phrase  In this paper, only the correct trials (i e  Target-Correct as target trials vs Imposter-Correct as non-target trials) are considered for evaluating systems as it has been proved that these are the most challenging trials in text-dependent SV BIBREF8, BIBREF12 
Table TABREF23 shows the results of text-dependent experiments using Persian 100-spk and 3-sess setup  For filtering trials, the respondents' mobile brand and model were used in this experiment  In the table, the first two letters in the filter notation relate to the target trials and the second two letters (i e  right side of the colon) relate for non-target trials  For target trials, the first Y means the enrolment and test utterances were recorded using a device with the same brand by the target speaker  The second Y letter means both recordings were done using exactly the same device model  Similarly, the first Y for non-target trials means that the devices of target and imposter speakers are from the same brand (i e  manufacturer)  The second Y means that, in addition to the same brand, both devices have the same model  So, the most difficult target trials are “NN”, where the speaker has used different a device at the test time  In the same manner, the most difficult non-target trials which should be rejected by the system are “YY” where the imposter speaker has used the same device model as the target speaker (note that it does not mean physically the same device because each speaker participated in the project using a personal mobile device)  Hence, the similarity in the recording channel makes rejection more difficult 
The first row in Table TABREF23 shows the results for all trials  By comparing the results with the best published results on RSR2015 and RedDots BIBREF10, BIBREF8, BIBREF12, it is clear that the DeepMine database is more challenging than both RSR2015 and RedDots databases  For RSR2015, the same i-vector/HMM-based method with both RWCCN and s-norm has achieved EER less than 0 3% for both genders (Table VI in BIBREF10)  The conventional Relevance MAP adaptation with HMM alignment without applying any channel-compensation techniques (i e  without applying RWCCN and s-norm due to the lack of suitable training data) on RedDots Part1 for the male has achieved EER around 1 5% (Table XI in BIBREF10)  It is worth noting that EERs for DeepMine database without any channel-compensation techniques are 2 1 and 3 7% for males and females respectively 
One interesting advantage of the DeepMine database compared to both RSR2015 and RedDots is having several target speakers with more than one mobile device  This is allows us to analyse the effects of channel compensation methods  The second row in Table TABREF23 corresponds to the most difficult trials where the target trials come from mobile devices with different models while imposter trials come from the same device models  It is clear that severe degradation was caused by this kind of channel effects (i e  decreasing within-speaker similarities while increasing between-speaker similarities), especially for females 
The results in the third row show the condition when target speakers at the test time use exactly the same device that was used for enrollment  Comparing this row with the results in the first row proves how much improvement can be achieved when exactly the same device is used by the target speaker 
The results in the fourth row show the condition when imposter speakers also use the same device model at test time to fool the system  So, in this case, there is no device mismatch in all trials  By comparing the results with the third row, we can see how much degradation is caused if we only consider the non-target trials with the same device 
The fifth row shows similar results when the imposter speakers use device of the same brand as the target speaker but with a different model  Surprisingly, in this case, the degradation is negligible and it means that mobiles from a specific brand (manufacturer) have different recording channel properties 
The degraded female results in the sixth row as compared to the third row show the effect of using a different device model from the same brand for target trials  For males, the filters brings almost the same subsets of trials, which explains the very similar results in this case 
Looking at the first two and the last row of Table TABREF23, one can notice the significantly worse performance obtained for the female trials as compared to males  Note that these three rows include target trials where the devices used for enrollment do not necessarily match the devices used for recording test utterances  On the other hand, in rows 3 to 6, which exclude such mismatched trials, the performance for males and females is comparable  This suggest that the degraded results for females are caused by some problematic trials with device mismatch  The exact reason for this degradation is so far unclear and needs a further investigation 
In the last row of the table, the condition of the second row is relaxed: the target device should have different model possibly from the same brand and imposter device only needs to be from the same brand  In this case, as was expected, the performance degradation is smaller than in the second row 
Experiments and Results ::: Speech Recognition Experiments
In addition to speaker verification, we present several speech recognition experiments on Part3  The experiments were performed with the Kaldi toolkit BIBREF13  For training HMM-based MonoPhone model, only 20 thousands of shortest utterances are used and for other models the whole training data is used  The DNN based acoustic model is a time-delay DNN with low-rank factorized layers and skip connections without i-vector adaptation (a modified network from one of the best performing LibriSpeech recipes)  The network is shown in Table TABREF25: there are 16 F-TDNN layers, with dimension 1536 and linear bottleneck layers of dimension 256  The acoustic model is trained for 10 epochs using lattice-free maximum mutual information (LF-MMI) with cross-entropy regularization BIBREF14  Re-scoring is done using a pruned trigram language model and the size of the dictionary is around 90,000 words 
Table TABREF26 shows the results in terms of word error rate (WER) for different evaluated methods  As can be seen, the created database can be used to train well performing and practically usable Persian ASR models 
Conclusions
In this paper, we have described the final version of a large speech corpus, the DeepMine database  It has been collected using crowdsourcing and, according to the best of our knowledge, it is the largest public text-dependent and text-prompted speaker verification database in two languages: Persian and English  In addition, it is the largest text-independent speaker verification evaluation database, making it suitable to robustly evaluate state-of-the-art methods on different conditions  Alongside these appealing properties, it comes with phone-level transcription, making it suitable to train deep neural network models for Persian speech recognition 
We provided several evaluation protocols for each part of the database  The protocols allow researchers to investigate the performance of different methods in various scenarios and study the effects of channels, duration and phrase text on the performance  We also provide two test sets for speech recognition: One normal test set with a few minutes of speech for each speaker and one large test set with more (30 minutes on average) speech that can be used for any speaker adaptation method 
As baseline results, we reported the performance of an i-vector/HMM based method on Persian text-dependent part  Moreover, we conducted speech recognition experiments using conventional HMM-based methods, as well as state-of-the-art deep neural network based method using Kaldi toolkit with promising performance  Text-dependent results have shown that the DeepMine database is more challenging than RSR2015 and RedDots databases 
Acknowledgments
The data collection project was mainly supported by Sharif DeepMine company  The work on the paper was supported by Czech National Science Foundation (GACR) project "NEUREM3" No  19-26934X and the National Programme of Sustainability (NPU II) project "IT4Innovations excellence in science - LQ1602" 
Context 3:  Finally, we evaluated all of our models on the remaining 10% (Table 1 and Table 2 )  For causal explanation detection task, we extracted discourse arguments using our parser and selected discourse arguments which most cover the annotated causal explanation text span as our gold standard 
Model
We build two types of models  First, we develop feature-based models which utilize features of the successful models in social media analysis and causal relation discourse parsing  Then, we build a recursive neural network model which uses distributed representation of discourse arguments as this approach can even capture latent properties of causal relations which may exist between distant discourse arguments  We specifically selected bidirectional LSTM since the model with the discourse distributional structure built in this form outperformed the traditional models in similar NLP downstream tasks BIBREF3  
As the first step of our pipeline, we use Tweebo parser BIBREF20 to extract syntactic features from messages  Then, we demarcate sentences using punctuation (`,') tag and periods  Among those sentences, we find discourse connectives defined in PDTB annotation along with a Tweet POS tag for conjunction words which can also be a discourse marker  In order to decide whether these connectives are really discourse connectives (e g , I went home, but he stayed) as opposed to simple connections of two words (I like apple and banana) we see if verb phrases exist before and after the connective by using dependency parsing results  Although discourse connective disambiguation is a complicated task which can be much improved by syntactic features BIBREF21 , we try to minimize effects of syntactic parsing and simplify it since it is highly error-prone in social media  Finally, according to visual inspection, emojis (`E' tag) are crucial for discourse relation in social media so we take them as separate discourse arguments (e g ,in “My test result    :(” the sad feeling is caused by the test result, but it cannot be captured by plain word tokens) 
We trained a linear SVM, an rbf SVM, and a random forest with N-gram, charater N-gram, and tweet POS tags, sentiment tags, average word lengths and word counts from each message as they have a pivotal role in the models for many NLP downstream tasks in social media BIBREF19 , BIBREF18   In addition to these features, we also extracted First-Last, First3 features and Word Pairs from every adjacent pair of discourse arguments since these features were most helpful for causal relation prediction BIBREF9   First-Last, First3 features are first and last word and first three words of two discourse arguments of the relation, and Word Pairs are the cross product of words of those discourse arguments  These two features enable our model to capture interaction between two discourse arguments  BIBREF9 reported that these two features along with verbs, modality, context, and polarity (which can be captured by N-grams, sentiment tags and POS tags in our previous features) obtained the best performance for predicting Contingency class to which causality belongs 
We load the GLOVE word embedding BIBREF22 trained in Twitter for each token of extracted discourse arguments from messages  For the distributional representation of discourse arguments, we run a Word-level LSTM on the words' embeddings within each discourse argument and concatenate last hidden state vectors of forward LSTM ( $\overrightarrow{h}$ ) and backward LSTM ( $\overleftarrow{h}$ ) which is suggested by BIBREF3 ( $DA = [\overrightarrow{h};\overleftarrow{h}]$ )  Then, we feed the sequence of the vector representation of discourse arguments to the Discourse-argument-level LSTM (DA-level LSTM) to make a final prediction with log softmax function  With this structure, the model can learn the representation of interaction of tokens inside each discourse argument, then capture discourse relations across all of the discourse arguments in each message (Figure 2 )  In order to prevent the overfitting, we added a dropout layer between the Word-level LSTM and the DA-level LSTM layer 
We also explore subsets of the full RNN architecture, specifically with one of the two LSTM layers removed  In the first model variant, we directly input all word embeddings of a whole message to a BiLSTM layer and make prediction (Word LSTM) without the help of the distributional vector representations of discourse arguments  In the second model variant, we take the average of all word embeddings of each discourse argument ( $DA_k=\frac{1}{N_k} \sum _{i=1}^{N_k}W_{i}$ ), and use them as inputs to a BiLSTM layer (DA AVG LSTM) as the average vector of embeddings were quite effective for representing the whole sequence BIBREF3 , BIBREF5   As with the full architectures, for CP both of these variants ends with a many-to-one classification per message, while the CEI model ends with a sequence of classifications 
Experiment
We explored three types of models (RBF SVM, Linear SVM, and Random Forest Classifier) which have previously been shown empirically useful for the language analysis in social media  We filtered out low frequency Word Pairs features as they tend to be noisy and sparse BIBREF9   Then, we conducted univariate feature selection to restrict all remaining features to those showing at least a small relationship with the outcome  Specifically, we keep all features passing a family-wise error rate of $\alpha = 60$ with the given outcome  After comparing the performance of the optimized version of each model, we also conducted a feature ablation test on the best model in order to see how much each feature contributes to the causality prediction 
We used bidirectional LSTMs for causality classification and causal explanation identification since the discourse arguments for causal explanation can show up either before and after the effected events or results and we want our model to be optimized for both cases  However, there is a risk of overfitting due to the dataset which is relatively small for the high complexity of the model, so we added a dropout layer (p=0 3) between the Word-level LSTM and the DA-level LSTM 
For tuning our model, we explore the dimensionality of word vector and LSTM hidden state vectors of discourse arguments of 25, 50, 100, and 200 as pretrained GLOVE vectors were trained in this setting  For optimization, we used Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Adam BIBREF23 with learning rates 0 01 and 0 001 
We ignore missing word embeddings because our dataset is quite small for retraining new word embeddings  However, if embeddings are extracted as separate discourse arguments, we used the average of all vectors of all discourse arguments in that message  Average embeddings have performed well for representing text sequences in other tasks BIBREF5  
We first use state-of-the-art PDTB taggers for our baseline BIBREF13 , BIBREF12 for the evaluation of the causality prediction of our models ( BIBREF12 requires sentences extracted from the text as its input, so we used our parser to extract sentences from the message)  Then, we compare how models work for each task and disassembled them to inspect how each part of the models can affect their final prediction performances  We conducted McNemar's test to determine whether the performance differences are statistically significant at $p <  05$  
Results
We investigated various models for both causality detection and explanation identification  Based on their performances on the task, we analyzed the relationships between the types of models and the tasks, and scrutinized further for the best performing models  For performance analysis, we reported weighted F1 of classes 
Causality Prediction
In order to classify whether a message contains causal relation, we compared off-the-shelf PDTB parsers, linear SVM, RBF SVM, Random forest and LSTM classifiers  The off-the-shelf parsers achieved the lowest accuracies ( BIBREF12 and BIBREF13 in Table 3 )  This result can be expected since 1) these models were trained with news articles and 2) they are trained for all possible discourse relations in addition to causal relations (e g , contrast, condition, etc)

ground_truth: Unanswerable

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. What types of social media did they consider?
Context 3:  Among our suggested models, SVM and random forest classifier performed better than LSTM and, in the general trend, the more complex the models were, the worse they performed  This suggests that the models with more direct and simpler learning methods with features might classify the causality messages better than the ones more optimized for capturing distributional information or non-linear relationships of features 
Table 4 shows the results of a feature ablation test to see how each feature contributes to causality classification performance of the linear SVM classifier  POS tags caused the largest drop in F1  We suspect POS tags played a unique role because discourse connectives can have various surface forms (e g , because, cuz, bcuz, etc) but still the same POS tag `P'  Also POS tags can capture the occurrences of modal verbs, a feature previously found to be very useful for detecting similar discourse relations BIBREF9   N-gram features caused 0 022 F1 drop while sentiment tags did not affect the model when removed  Unlike the previous work where First-Last, First3 and Word pairs tended to gain a large F1 increase for multiclass discourse relation prediction, in our case, they did not affect the prediction performance compared to other feature types such as POS tags or N-grams 
Causal Explanation Identification
In this task, the model identifies causal explanations given the discourse arguments of the causality message  We explored over the same models as those we used for causality (sans the output layer), and found the almost opposite trend of performances (see Table 5 )  The Linear SVM obtained lowest F1 while the LSTM model made the best identification performance  As opposed to the simple binary classification of the causality messages, in order to detect causal explanation, it is more beneficial to consider the relation across discourse arguments of the whole message and implicit distributional representation due to the implicit causal relations between two distant arguments 
Architectural Variants
For causality prediction, we experimented with only word tokens in the whole message without help of Word-level LSTM layer (Word LSTM), and F1 dropped by 0 064 (CP in Table 6 )  Also, when we used the average of the sequence of word embeddings of each discourse argument as an input to the DA-level LSTM and it caused F1 drop of 0 073  This suggests that the information gained from both the interaction of words in and in between discourse arguments help when the model utilizes the distributional representation of the texts 
For causal explanation identification, in order to test how the LSTM classifier works without its capability of capturing the relations between discourse arguments, we removed DA-level LSTM layer and ran the LSTM directly on the word embedding sequence for each discourse argument for classifying whether the argument is causal explanation, and the model had 0 061 F1 drop (Word LSTM in CEI in Table 6 )  Also, when we ran DA-level LSTM on the average vectors of the word sequences of each discourse argument of messages, F1 decreased to 0 818  This follows the similar pattern observed from other types of models performances (i e , SVMs and Random Forest classifiers) that the models with higher complexity for capturing the interaction of discourse arguments tend to identify causal explanation with the higher accuracies 
For CEI task, we found that when the model ran on the sequence representation of discourse argument (DA AVG LSTM), its performance was higher than the plain sequence of word embeddings (Word LSTM)  Finally, in both subtasks, when the models ran on both Word-level and DA-Level (Full LSTM), they obtained the highest performance 
Complete Pipeline
Evaluations thus far zeroed-in on each subtask of causal explanation analysis (i e  CEI only focused on data already identified to contain causal explanations)  Here, we seek to evaluate the complete pipeline of CP and CEI, starting from all of test data (those or without causality) and evaluating the final accuracy of CEI predictions  This is intended to evaluate CEI performance under an applied setting where one does not already know whether a document has a causal explanation 
There are several approaches we could take to perform CEI starting from unannotated data  We could simply run CEI prediction by itself (CEI Only) or the pipeline of CP first and then only run CEI on documents predicted as causal (CP + CEI)  Further, the CEI model could be trained only on those documents annotated causal (as was done in the previous experiments) or on all training documents including many that are not causal 
Table 7 show results varying the pipeline and how CEI was trained  Though all setups performed decent ( $F1 > 0 81$ ) we see that the pipelined approach, first predicting causality (with the linear SVM) and then predicting causal explanations only for those with marked causal (CP + CEI $_{causal}$ ) yielded the strongest results  This also utilized the CEI model only trained on those annotated causal  Besides performance, an added benefit from this two step approach is that the CP step is less computational intensive of the CEI step and approximately 2/3 of documents will never need the CEI step applied 
We had an inevitable limitation on the size of our dataset, since there is no other causality dataset over social media and the annotation required an intensive iterative process  This might have limited performances of more complex models, but considering the processing time and the computation load, the combination of the linear model and the RNN-based model of our pipeline obtained both the high performance and efficiency for the practical applications to downstream tasks  In other words, it's possible the linear model will not perform as well if the training size is increased substantially  However, a linear model could still be used to do a first-pass, computationally efficient labeling, in order to shortlist social media posts for further labeling from an LSTM or more complex model 
Exploration
Here, we explore the use of causal explanation analysis for downstream tasks  First we look at the relationship between use of causal explanation and one's demographics: age and gender  Then, we consider their use in sentiment analysis for extracting the causes of polarity ratings  Research involving human subjects was approved by the University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board 
Conclusion
We developed a pipeline for causal explanation analysis over social media text, including both causality prediction and causal explanation identification  We examined a variety of model types and RNN architectures for each part of the pipeline, finding an SVM best for causality prediction and a hierarchy of BiLSTMs for causal explanation identification, suggesting the later task relies more heavily on sequential information  In fact, we found replacing either layer of the hierarchical LSTM architecture (the word-level or the DA-level) with a an equivalent “bag of features” approach resulted in reduced accuracy  Results of our whole pipeline of causal explanation analysis were found quite strong, achieving an $F1=0 868$ at identifying discourse arguments that are causal explanations 
Finally, we demonstrated use of our models in applications, finding associations between demographics and rate of mentioning causal explanations, as well as showing differences in the top words predictive of negative ratings in Yelp reviews  Utilization of discourse structure in social media analysis has been a largely untapped area of exploration, perhaps due to its perceived difficulty  We hope the strong results of causal explanation identification here leads to the integration of more syntax and deeper semantics into social media analyses and ultimately enables new applications beyond the current state of the art 
Acknowledgments
This work was supported, in part, by a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust (ID #TRT0048)  The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript  We also thank Laura Smith, Yiyi Chen, Greta Jawel and Vanessa Hernandez for their work in identifying causal explanations 

ground_truth: Facebook status update messages

Facebook status update messages