Datasets:

Modalities:
Text
Languages:
English
ArXiv:
Libraries:
Datasets
License:
id
stringlengths
10
10
title
stringlengths
12
156
abstract
stringlengths
279
2.02k
full_text
sequence
qas
sequence
figures_and_tables
sequence
1909.00694
Minimally Supervised Learning of Affective Events Using Discourse Relations
Recognizing affective events that trigger positive or negative sentiment has a wide range of natural language processing applications but remains a challenging problem mainly because the polarity of an event is not necessarily predictable from its constituent words. In this paper, we propose to propagate affective polarity using discourse relations. Our method is simple and only requires a very small seed lexicon and a large raw corpus. Our experiments using Japanese data show that our method learns affective events effectively without manually labeled data. It also improves supervised learning results when labeled data are small.
{ "section_name": [ "Introduction", "Related Work", "Proposed Method", "Proposed Method ::: Polarity Function", "Proposed Method ::: Discourse Relation-Based Event Pairs", "Proposed Method ::: Discourse Relation-Based Event Pairs ::: AL (Automatically Labeled Pairs)", "Proposed Method ::: Discourse Relation-Based Event Pairs ::: CA (Cause Pairs)", "Proposed Method ::: Discourse Relation-Based Event Pairs ::: CO (Concession Pairs)", "Proposed Method ::: Loss Functions", "Experiments", "Experiments ::: Dataset", "Experiments ::: Dataset ::: AL, CA, and CO", "Experiments ::: Dataset ::: ACP (ACP Corpus)", "Experiments ::: Model Configurations", "Experiments ::: Results and Discussion", "Conclusion", "Acknowledgments", "Appendices ::: Seed Lexicon ::: Positive Words", "Appendices ::: Seed Lexicon ::: Negative Words", "Appendices ::: Settings of Encoder ::: BiGRU", "Appendices ::: Settings of Encoder ::: BERT" ], "paragraphs": [ [ "Affective events BIBREF0 are events that typically affect people in positive or negative ways. For example, getting money and playing sports are usually positive to the experiencers; catching cold and losing one's wallet are negative. Understanding affective events is important to various natural language processing (NLP) applications such as dialogue systems BIBREF1, question-answering systems BIBREF2, and humor recognition BIBREF3. In this paper, we work on recognizing the polarity of an affective event that is represented by a score ranging from $-1$ (negative) to 1 (positive).", "Learning affective events is challenging because, as the examples above suggest, the polarity of an event is not necessarily predictable from its constituent words. Combined with the unbounded combinatorial nature of language, the non-compositionality of affective polarity entails the need for large amounts of world knowledge, which can hardly be learned from small annotated data.", "In this paper, we propose a simple and effective method for learning affective events that only requires a very small seed lexicon and a large raw corpus. As illustrated in Figure FIGREF1, our key idea is that we can exploit discourse relations BIBREF4 to efficiently propagate polarity from seed predicates that directly report one's emotions (e.g., “to be glad” is positive). Suppose that events $x_1$ are $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Cause (i.e., $x_1$ causes $x_2$). If the seed lexicon suggests $x_2$ is positive, $x_1$ is also likely to be positive because it triggers the positive emotion. The fact that $x_2$ is known to be negative indicates the negative polarity of $x_1$. Similarly, if $x_1$ and $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Concession (i.e., $x_2$ in spite of $x_1$), the reverse of $x_2$'s polarity can be propagated to $x_1$. Even if $x_2$'s polarity is not known in advance, we can exploit the tendency of $x_1$ and $x_2$ to be of the same polarity (for Cause) or of the reverse polarity (for Concession) although the heuristic is not exempt from counterexamples. We transform this idea into objective functions and train neural network models that predict the polarity of a given event.", "We trained the models using a Japanese web corpus. Given the minimum amount of supervision, they performed well. In addition, the combination of annotated and unannotated data yielded a gain over a purely supervised baseline when labeled data were small." ], [ "Learning affective events is closely related to sentiment analysis. Whereas sentiment analysis usually focuses on the polarity of what are described (e.g., movies), we work on how people are typically affected by events. In sentiment analysis, much attention has been paid to compositionality. Word-level polarity BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7 and the roles of negation and intensification BIBREF8, BIBREF6, BIBREF9 are among the most important topics. In contrast, we are more interested in recognizing the sentiment polarity of an event that pertains to commonsense knowledge (e.g., getting money and catching cold).", "Label propagation from seed instances is a common approach to inducing sentiment polarities. While BIBREF5 and BIBREF10 worked on word- and phrase-level polarities, BIBREF0 dealt with event-level polarities. BIBREF5 and BIBREF10 linked instances using co-occurrence information and/or phrase-level coordinations (e.g., “$A$ and $B$” and “$A$ but $B$”). We shift our scope to event pairs that are more complex than phrase pairs, and consequently exploit discourse connectives as event-level counterparts of phrase-level conjunctions.", "BIBREF0 constructed a network of events using word embedding-derived similarities. Compared with this method, our discourse relation-based linking of events is much simpler and more intuitive.", "Some previous studies made use of document structure to understand the sentiment. BIBREF11 proposed a sentiment-specific pre-training strategy using unlabeled dialog data (tweet-reply pairs). BIBREF12 proposed a method of building a polarity-tagged corpus (ACP Corpus). They automatically gathered sentences that had positive or negative opinions utilizing HTML layout structures in addition to linguistic patterns. Our method depends only on raw texts and thus has wider applicability.", "" ], [ "" ], [ "", "Our goal is to learn the polarity function $p(x)$, which predicts the sentiment polarity score of an event $x$. We approximate $p(x)$ by a neural network with the following form:", "${\\rm Encoder}$ outputs a vector representation of the event $x$. ${\\rm Linear}$ is a fully-connected layer and transforms the representation into a scalar. ${\\rm tanh}$ is the hyperbolic tangent and transforms the scalar into a score ranging from $-1$ to 1. In Section SECREF21, we consider two specific implementations of ${\\rm Encoder}$.", "" ], [ "Our method requires a very small seed lexicon and a large raw corpus. We assume that we can automatically extract discourse-tagged event pairs, $(x_{i1}, x_{i2})$ ($i=1, \\cdots $) from the raw corpus. We refer to $x_{i1}$ and $x_{i2}$ as former and latter events, respectively. As shown in Figure FIGREF1, we limit our scope to two discourse relations: Cause and Concession.", "The seed lexicon consists of positive and negative predicates. If the predicate of an extracted event is in the seed lexicon and does not involve complex phenomena like negation, we assign the corresponding polarity score ($+1$ for positive events and $-1$ for negative events) to the event. We expect the model to automatically learn complex phenomena through label propagation. Based on the availability of scores and the types of discourse relations, we classify the extracted event pairs into the following three types.", "" ], [ "The seed lexicon matches (1) the latter event but (2) not the former event, and (3) their discourse relation type is Cause or Concession. If the discourse relation type is Cause, the former event is given the same score as the latter. Likewise, if the discourse relation type is Concession, the former event is given the opposite of the latter's score. They are used as reference scores during training.", "" ], [ "The seed lexicon matches neither the former nor the latter event, and their discourse relation type is Cause. We assume the two events have the same polarities.", "" ], [ "The seed lexicon matches neither the former nor the latter event, and their discourse relation type is Concession. We assume the two events have the reversed polarities.", "" ], [ "Using AL, CA, and CO data, we optimize the parameters of the polarity function $p(x)$. We define a loss function for each of the three types of event pairs and sum up the multiple loss functions.", "We use mean squared error to construct loss functions. For the AL data, the loss function is defined as:", "where $x_{i1}$ and $x_{i2}$ are the $i$-th pair of the AL data. $r_{i1}$ and $r_{i2}$ are the automatically-assigned scores of $x_{i1}$ and $x_{i2}$, respectively. $N_{\\rm AL}$ is the total number of AL pairs, and $\\lambda _{\\rm AL}$ is a hyperparameter.", "For the CA data, the loss function is defined as:", "$y_{i1}$ and $y_{i2}$ are the $i$-th pair of the CA pairs. $N_{\\rm CA}$ is the total number of CA pairs. $\\lambda _{\\rm CA}$ and $\\mu $ are hyperparameters. The first term makes the scores of the two events closer while the second term prevents the scores from shrinking to zero.", "The loss function for the CO data is defined analogously:", "The difference is that the first term makes the scores of the two events distant from each other.", "" ], [ "" ], [ "" ], [ "As a raw corpus, we used a Japanese web corpus that was compiled through the procedures proposed by BIBREF13. To extract event pairs tagged with discourse relations, we used the Japanese dependency parser KNP and in-house postprocessing scripts BIBREF14. KNP used hand-written rules to segment each sentence into what we conventionally called clauses (mostly consecutive text chunks), each of which contained one main predicate. KNP also identified the discourse relations of event pairs if explicit discourse connectives BIBREF4 such as “ので” (because) and “のに” (in spite of) were present. We treated Cause/Reason (原因・理由) and Condition (条件) in the original tagset BIBREF15 as Cause and Concession (逆接) as Concession, respectively. Here is an example of event pair extraction.", ". 重大な失敗を犯したので、仕事をクビになった。", "Because [I] made a serious mistake, [I] got fired.", "From this sentence, we extracted the event pair of “重大な失敗を犯す” ([I] make a serious mistake) and “仕事をクビになる” ([I] get fired), and tagged it with Cause.", "We constructed our seed lexicon consisting of 15 positive words and 15 negative words, as shown in Section SECREF27. From the corpus of about 100 million sentences, we obtained 1.4 millions event pairs for AL, 41 millions for CA, and 6 millions for CO. We randomly selected subsets of AL event pairs such that positive and negative latter events were equal in size. We also sampled event pairs for each of CA and CO such that it was five times larger than AL. The results are shown in Table TABREF16." ], [ "We used the latest version of the ACP Corpus BIBREF12 for evaluation. It was used for (semi-)supervised training as well. Extracted from Japanese websites using HTML layouts and linguistic patterns, the dataset covered various genres. For example, the following two sentences were labeled positive and negative, respectively:", ". 作業が楽だ。", "The work is easy.", ". 駐車場がない。", "There is no parking lot.", "Although the ACP corpus was originally constructed in the context of sentiment analysis, we found that it could roughly be regarded as a collection of affective events. We parsed each sentence and extracted the last clause in it. The train/dev/test split of the data is shown in Table TABREF19.", "The objective function for supervised training is:", "", "where $v_i$ is the $i$-th event, $R_i$ is the reference score of $v_i$, and $N_{\\rm ACP}$ is the number of the events of the ACP Corpus.", "To optimize the hyperparameters, we used the dev set of the ACP Corpus. For the evaluation, we used the test set of the ACP Corpus. The model output was classified as positive if $p(x) > 0$ and negative if $p(x) \\le 0$.", "" ], [ "As for ${\\rm Encoder}$, we compared two types of neural networks: BiGRU and BERT. GRU BIBREF16 is a recurrent neural network sequence encoder. BiGRU reads an input sequence forward and backward and the output is the concatenation of the final forward and backward hidden states.", "BERT BIBREF17 is a pre-trained multi-layer bidirectional Transformer BIBREF18 encoder. Its output is the final hidden state corresponding to the special classification tag ([CLS]). For the details of ${\\rm Encoder}$, see Sections SECREF30.", "We trained the model with the following four combinations of the datasets: AL, AL+CA+CO (two proposed models), ACP (supervised), and ACP+AL+CA+CO (semi-supervised). The corresponding objective functions were: $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm AL}$, $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm AL} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CA} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CO}$, $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm ACP}$, and $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm ACP} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm AL} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CA} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CO}$.", "" ], [ "", "Table TABREF23 shows accuracy. As the Random baseline suggests, positive and negative labels were distributed evenly. The Random+Seed baseline made use of the seed lexicon and output the corresponding label (or the reverse of it for negation) if the event's predicate is in the seed lexicon. We can see that the seed lexicon itself had practically no impact on prediction.", "The models in the top block performed considerably better than the random baselines. The performance gaps with their (semi-)supervised counterparts, shown in the middle block, were less than 7%. This demonstrates the effectiveness of discourse relation-based label propagation.", "Comparing the model variants, we obtained the highest score with the BiGRU encoder trained with the AL+CA+CO dataset. BERT was competitive but its performance went down if CA and CO were used in addition to AL. We conjecture that BERT was more sensitive to noises found more frequently in CA and CO.", "Contrary to our expectations, supervised models (ACP) outperformed semi-supervised models (ACP+AL+CA+CO). This suggests that the training set of 0.6 million events is sufficiently large for training the models. For comparison, we trained the models with a subset (6,000 events) of the ACP dataset. As the results shown in Table TABREF24 demonstrate, our method is effective when labeled data are small.", "The result of hyperparameter optimization for the BiGRU encoder was as follows:", "As the CA and CO pairs were equal in size (Table TABREF16), $\\lambda _{\\rm CA}$ and $\\lambda _{\\rm CO}$ were comparable values. $\\lambda _{\\rm CA}$ was about one-third of $\\lambda _{\\rm CO}$, and this indicated that the CA pairs were noisier than the CO pairs. A major type of CA pairs that violates our assumption was in the form of “$\\textit {problem}_{\\text{negative}}$ causes $\\textit {solution}_{\\text{positive}}$”:", ". (悪いところがある, よくなるように努力する)", "(there is a bad point, [I] try to improve [it])", "The polarities of the two events were reversed in spite of the Cause relation, and this lowered the value of $\\lambda _{\\rm CA}$.", "Some examples of model outputs are shown in Table TABREF26. The first two examples suggest that our model successfully learned negation without explicit supervision. Similarly, the next two examples differ only in voice but the model correctly recognized that they had opposite polarities. The last two examples share the predicate “落とす\" (drop) and only the objects are different. The second event “肩を落とす\" (lit. drop one's shoulders) is an idiom that expresses a disappointed feeling. The examples demonstrate that our model correctly learned non-compositional expressions.", "" ], [ "In this paper, we proposed to use discourse relations to effectively propagate polarities of affective events from seeds. Experiments show that, even with a minimal amount of supervision, the proposed method performed well.", "Although event pairs linked by discourse analysis are shown to be useful, they nevertheless contain noises. Adding linguistically-motivated filtering rules would help improve the performance." ], [ "We thank Nobuhiro Kaji for providing the ACP Corpus and Hirokazu Kiyomaru and Yudai Kishimoto for their help in extracting event pairs. This work was partially supported by Yahoo! Japan Corporation." ], [ "喜ぶ (rejoice), 嬉しい (be glad), 楽しい (be pleasant), 幸せ (be happy), 感動 (be impressed), 興奮 (be excited), 懐かしい (feel nostalgic), 好き (like), 尊敬 (respect), 安心 (be relieved), 感心 (admire), 落ち着く (be calm), 満足 (be satisfied), 癒される (be healed), and スッキリ (be refreshed)." ], [ "怒る (get angry), 悲しい (be sad), 寂しい (be lonely), 怖い (be scared), 不安 (feel anxious), 恥ずかしい (be embarrassed), 嫌 (hate), 落ち込む (feel down), 退屈 (be bored), 絶望 (feel hopeless), 辛い (have a hard time), 困る (have trouble), 憂鬱 (be depressed), 心配 (be worried), and 情けない (be sorry)." ], [ "The dimension of the embedding layer was 256. The embedding layer was initialized with the word embeddings pretrained using the Web corpus. The input sentences were segmented into words by the morphological analyzer Juman++. The vocabulary size was 100,000. The number of hidden layers was 2. The dimension of hidden units was 256. The optimizer was Momentum SGD BIBREF21. The mini-batch size was 1024. We ran 100 epochs and selected the snapshot that achieved the highest score for the dev set." ], [ "We used a Japanese BERT model pretrained with Japanese Wikipedia. The input sentences were segmented into words by Juman++, and words were broken into subwords by applying BPE BIBREF20. The vocabulary size was 32,000. The maximum length of an input sequence was 128. The number of hidden layers was 12. The dimension of hidden units was 768. The number of self-attention heads was 12. The optimizer was Adam BIBREF19. The mini-batch size was 32. We ran 1 epoch." ] ] }
{ "question": [ "What is the seed lexicon?", "What are the results?", "How are relations used to propagate polarity?", "How big is the Japanese data?", "What are labels available in dataset for supervision?", "How big are improvements of supervszed learning results trained on smalled labeled data enhanced with proposed approach copared to basic approach?", "How does their model learn using mostly raw data?", "How big is seed lexicon used for training?", "How large is raw corpus used for training?" ], "question_id": [ "753990d0b621d390ed58f20c4d9e4f065f0dc672", "9d578ddccc27dd849244d632dd0f6bf27348ad81", "02e4bf719b1a504e385c35c6186742e720bcb281", "44c4bd6decc86f1091b5fc0728873d9324cdde4e", "86abeff85f3db79cf87a8c993e5e5aa61226dc98", "c029deb7f99756d2669abad0a349d917428e9c12", "39f8db10d949c6b477fa4b51e7c184016505884f", "d0bc782961567dc1dd7e074b621a6d6be44bb5b4", "a592498ba2fac994cd6fad7372836f0adb37e22a" ], "nlp_background": [ "two", "two", "two", "two", "zero", "zero", "zero", "zero", "zero" ], "topic_background": [ "unfamiliar", "unfamiliar", "unfamiliar", "unfamiliar", "unfamiliar", "unfamiliar", "unfamiliar", "unfamiliar", "unfamiliar" ], "paper_read": [ "no", "no", "no", "no", "no", "no", "no", "no", "no" ], "search_query": [ "", "", "", "", "", "", "", "", "" ], "question_writer": [ "c1fbdd7a261021041f75fbe00a55b4c386ebbbb4", "c1fbdd7a261021041f75fbe00a55b4c386ebbbb4", "c1fbdd7a261021041f75fbe00a55b4c386ebbbb4", "c1fbdd7a261021041f75fbe00a55b4c386ebbbb4", "258ee4069f740c400c0049a2580945a1cc7f044c", "258ee4069f740c400c0049a2580945a1cc7f044c", "258ee4069f740c400c0049a2580945a1cc7f044c", "258ee4069f740c400c0049a2580945a1cc7f044c", "258ee4069f740c400c0049a2580945a1cc7f044c" ], "answers": [ { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "a vocabulary of positive and negative predicates that helps determine the polarity score of an event", "evidence": [ "The seed lexicon consists of positive and negative predicates. If the predicate of an extracted event is in the seed lexicon and does not involve complex phenomena like negation, we assign the corresponding polarity score ($+1$ for positive events and $-1$ for negative events) to the event. We expect the model to automatically learn complex phenomena through label propagation. Based on the availability of scores and the types of discourse relations, we classify the extracted event pairs into the following three types." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "The seed lexicon consists of positive and negative predicates. If the predicate of an extracted event is in the seed lexicon and does not involve complex phenomena like negation, we assign the corresponding polarity score ($+1$ for positive events and $-1$ for negative events) to the event.", "It is a " ] }, { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [ "seed lexicon consists of positive and negative predicates" ], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "The seed lexicon consists of positive and negative predicates. If the predicate of an extracted event is in the seed lexicon and does not involve complex phenomena like negation, we assign the corresponding polarity score ($+1$ for positive events and $-1$ for negative events) to the event. We expect the model to automatically learn complex phenomena through label propagation. Based on the availability of scores and the types of discourse relations, we classify the extracted event pairs into the following three types." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "The seed lexicon consists of positive and negative predicates. If the predicate of an extracted event is in the seed lexicon and does not involve complex phenomena like negation, we assign the corresponding polarity score ($+1$ for positive events and $-1$ for negative events) to the event." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "31e85022a847f37c15fd0415f3c450c74c8e4755", "95da0a6e1b08db74a405c6a71067c9b272a50ff5" ], "worker_id": [ "c1fbdd7a261021041f75fbe00a55b4c386ebbbb4", "2cfd959e433f290bb50b55722370f0d22fe090b7" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "Using all data to train: AL -- BiGRU achieved 0.843 accuracy, AL -- BERT achieved 0.863 accuracy, AL+CA+CO -- BiGRU achieved 0.866 accuracy, AL+CA+CO -- BERT achieved 0.835, accuracy, ACP -- BiGRU achieved 0.919 accuracy, ACP -- BERT achived 0.933, accuracy, ACP+AL+CA+CO -- BiGRU achieved 0.917 accuracy, ACP+AL+CA+CO -- BERT achieved 0.913 accuracy. \nUsing a subset to train: BERT achieved 0.876 accuracy using ACP (6K), BERT achieved 0.886 accuracy using ACP (6K) + AL, BiGRU achieved 0.830 accuracy using ACP (6K), BiGRU achieved 0.879 accuracy using ACP (6K) + AL + CA + CO.", "evidence": [ "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 3: Performance of various models on the ACP test set.", "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 4: Results for small labeled training data. Given the performance with the full dataset, we show BERT trained only with the AL data.", "As for ${\\rm Encoder}$, we compared two types of neural networks: BiGRU and BERT. GRU BIBREF16 is a recurrent neural network sequence encoder. BiGRU reads an input sequence forward and backward and the output is the concatenation of the final forward and backward hidden states.", "We trained the model with the following four combinations of the datasets: AL, AL+CA+CO (two proposed models), ACP (supervised), and ACP+AL+CA+CO (semi-supervised). The corresponding objective functions were: $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm AL}$, $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm AL} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CA} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CO}$, $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm ACP}$, and $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm ACP} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm AL} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CA} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CO}$." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 3: Performance of various models on the ACP test set.", "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 4: Results for small labeled training data. Given the performance with the full dataset, we show BERT trained only with the AL data.", "As for ${\\rm Encoder}$, we compared two types of neural networks: BiGRU and BERT. ", "We trained the model with the following four combinations of the datasets: AL, AL+CA+CO (two proposed models), ACP (supervised), and ACP+AL+CA+CO (semi-supervised). The corresponding objective functions were: $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm AL}$, $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm AL} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CA} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CO}$, $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm ACP}$, and $\\mathcal {L}_{\\rm ACP} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm AL} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CA} + \\mathcal {L}_{\\rm CO}$." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "1e5e867244ea656c4b7632628086209cf9bae5fa" ], "worker_id": [ "2cfd959e433f290bb50b55722370f0d22fe090b7" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "based on the relation between events, the suggested polarity of one event can determine the possible polarity of the other event ", "evidence": [ "In this paper, we propose a simple and effective method for learning affective events that only requires a very small seed lexicon and a large raw corpus. As illustrated in Figure FIGREF1, our key idea is that we can exploit discourse relations BIBREF4 to efficiently propagate polarity from seed predicates that directly report one's emotions (e.g., “to be glad” is positive). Suppose that events $x_1$ are $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Cause (i.e., $x_1$ causes $x_2$). If the seed lexicon suggests $x_2$ is positive, $x_1$ is also likely to be positive because it triggers the positive emotion. The fact that $x_2$ is known to be negative indicates the negative polarity of $x_1$. Similarly, if $x_1$ and $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Concession (i.e., $x_2$ in spite of $x_1$), the reverse of $x_2$'s polarity can be propagated to $x_1$. Even if $x_2$'s polarity is not known in advance, we can exploit the tendency of $x_1$ and $x_2$ to be of the same polarity (for Cause) or of the reverse polarity (for Concession) although the heuristic is not exempt from counterexamples. We transform this idea into objective functions and train neural network models that predict the polarity of a given event." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "As illustrated in Figure FIGREF1, our key idea is that we can exploit discourse relations BIBREF4 to efficiently propagate polarity from seed predicates that directly report one's emotions (e.g., “to be glad” is positive). Suppose that events $x_1$ are $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Cause (i.e., $x_1$ causes $x_2$). If the seed lexicon suggests $x_2$ is positive, $x_1$ is also likely to be positive because it triggers the positive emotion. The fact that $x_2$ is known to be negative indicates the negative polarity of $x_1$. Similarly, if $x_1$ and $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Concession (i.e., $x_2$ in spite of $x_1$), the reverse of $x_2$'s polarity can be propagated to $x_1$. Even if $x_2$'s polarity is not known in advance, we can exploit the tendency of $x_1$ and $x_2$ to be of the same polarity (for Cause) or of the reverse polarity (for Concession) although the heuristic is not exempt from counterexamples. We transform this idea into objective functions and train neural network models that predict the polarity of a given event." ] }, { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "cause relation: both events in the relation should have the same polarity; concession relation: events should have opposite polarity", "evidence": [ "In this paper, we propose a simple and effective method for learning affective events that only requires a very small seed lexicon and a large raw corpus. As illustrated in Figure FIGREF1, our key idea is that we can exploit discourse relations BIBREF4 to efficiently propagate polarity from seed predicates that directly report one's emotions (e.g., “to be glad” is positive). Suppose that events $x_1$ are $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Cause (i.e., $x_1$ causes $x_2$). If the seed lexicon suggests $x_2$ is positive, $x_1$ is also likely to be positive because it triggers the positive emotion. The fact that $x_2$ is known to be negative indicates the negative polarity of $x_1$. Similarly, if $x_1$ and $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Concession (i.e., $x_2$ in spite of $x_1$), the reverse of $x_2$'s polarity can be propagated to $x_1$. Even if $x_2$'s polarity is not known in advance, we can exploit the tendency of $x_1$ and $x_2$ to be of the same polarity (for Cause) or of the reverse polarity (for Concession) although the heuristic is not exempt from counterexamples. We transform this idea into objective functions and train neural network models that predict the polarity of a given event.", "The seed lexicon consists of positive and negative predicates. If the predicate of an extracted event is in the seed lexicon and does not involve complex phenomena like negation, we assign the corresponding polarity score ($+1$ for positive events and $-1$ for negative events) to the event. We expect the model to automatically learn complex phenomena through label propagation. Based on the availability of scores and the types of discourse relations, we classify the extracted event pairs into the following three types." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "As illustrated in Figure FIGREF1, our key idea is that we can exploit discourse relations BIBREF4 to efficiently propagate polarity from seed predicates that directly report one's emotions (e.g., “to be glad” is positive). Suppose that events $x_1$ are $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Cause (i.e., $x_1$ causes $x_2$). If the seed lexicon suggests $x_2$ is positive, $x_1$ is also likely to be positive because it triggers the positive emotion. The fact that $x_2$ is known to be negative indicates the negative polarity of $x_1$. Similarly, if $x_1$ and $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Concession (i.e., $x_2$ in spite of $x_1$), the reverse of $x_2$'s polarity can be propagated to $x_1$. Even if $x_2$'s polarity is not known in advance, we can exploit the tendency of $x_1$ and $x_2$ to be of the same polarity (for Cause) or of the reverse polarity (for Concession) although the heuristic is not exempt from counterexamples. We transform this idea into objective functions and train neural network models that predict the polarity of a given event.", "The seed lexicon consists of positive and negative predicates. If the predicate of an extracted event is in the seed lexicon and does not involve complex phenomena like negation, we assign the corresponding polarity score ($+1$ for positive events and $-1$ for negative events) to the event. We expect the model to automatically learn complex phenomena through label propagation." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "49a78a07d2eed545556a835ccf2eb40e5eee9801", "acd6d15bd67f4b1496ee8af1c93c33e7d59c89e1" ], "worker_id": [ "c1fbdd7a261021041f75fbe00a55b4c386ebbbb4", "2cfd959e433f290bb50b55722370f0d22fe090b7" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "7000000 pairs of events were extracted from the Japanese Web corpus, 529850 pairs of events were extracted from the ACP corpus", "evidence": [ "As a raw corpus, we used a Japanese web corpus that was compiled through the procedures proposed by BIBREF13. To extract event pairs tagged with discourse relations, we used the Japanese dependency parser KNP and in-house postprocessing scripts BIBREF14. KNP used hand-written rules to segment each sentence into what we conventionally called clauses (mostly consecutive text chunks), each of which contained one main predicate. KNP also identified the discourse relations of event pairs if explicit discourse connectives BIBREF4 such as “ので” (because) and “のに” (in spite of) were present. We treated Cause/Reason (原因・理由) and Condition (条件) in the original tagset BIBREF15 as Cause and Concession (逆接) as Concession, respectively. Here is an example of event pair extraction.", "We constructed our seed lexicon consisting of 15 positive words and 15 negative words, as shown in Section SECREF27. From the corpus of about 100 million sentences, we obtained 1.4 millions event pairs for AL, 41 millions for CA, and 6 millions for CO. We randomly selected subsets of AL event pairs such that positive and negative latter events were equal in size. We also sampled event pairs for each of CA and CO such that it was five times larger than AL. The results are shown in Table TABREF16.", "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 1: Statistics of the AL, CA, and CO datasets.", "We used the latest version of the ACP Corpus BIBREF12 for evaluation. It was used for (semi-)supervised training as well. Extracted from Japanese websites using HTML layouts and linguistic patterns, the dataset covered various genres. For example, the following two sentences were labeled positive and negative, respectively:", "Although the ACP corpus was originally constructed in the context of sentiment analysis, we found that it could roughly be regarded as a collection of affective events. We parsed each sentence and extracted the last clause in it. The train/dev/test split of the data is shown in Table TABREF19.", "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 2: Details of the ACP dataset." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "As a raw corpus, we used a Japanese web corpus that was compiled through the procedures proposed by BIBREF13. ", "From the corpus of about 100 million sentences, we obtained 1.4 millions event pairs for AL, 41 millions for CA, and 6 millions for CO. We randomly selected subsets of AL event pairs such that positive and negative latter events were equal in size. We also sampled event pairs for each of CA and CO such that it was five times larger than AL. The results are shown in Table TABREF16.", "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 1: Statistics of the AL, CA, and CO datasets.", "We used the latest version of the ACP Corpus BIBREF12 for evaluation. It was used for (semi-)supervised training as well.", "Although the ACP corpus was originally constructed in the context of sentiment analysis, we found that it could roughly be regarded as a collection of affective events. We parsed each sentence and extracted the last clause in it. The train/dev/test split of the data is shown in Table TABREF19.", "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 2: Details of the ACP dataset." ] }, { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "The ACP corpus has around 700k events split into positive and negative polarity ", "evidence": [ "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 2: Details of the ACP dataset." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 2: Details of the ACP dataset." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "36926a4c9e14352c91111150aa4c6edcc5c0770f", "75b6dd28ccab20a70087635d89c2b22d0e99095c" ], "worker_id": [ "2cfd959e433f290bb50b55722370f0d22fe090b7", "c1fbdd7a261021041f75fbe00a55b4c386ebbbb4" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [ "negative", "positive" ], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "Affective events BIBREF0 are events that typically affect people in positive or negative ways. For example, getting money and playing sports are usually positive to the experiencers; catching cold and losing one's wallet are negative. Understanding affective events is important to various natural language processing (NLP) applications such as dialogue systems BIBREF1, question-answering systems BIBREF2, and humor recognition BIBREF3. In this paper, we work on recognizing the polarity of an affective event that is represented by a score ranging from $-1$ (negative) to 1 (positive)." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "In this paper, we work on recognizing the polarity of an affective event that is represented by a score ranging from $-1$ (negative) to 1 (positive)." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "2d8c7df145c37aad905e48f64d8caa69e54434d4" ], "worker_id": [ "c1018a31c3272ce74964a3280069f62f314a1a58" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "3%", "evidence": [ "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 4: Results for small labeled training data. Given the performance with the full dataset, we show BERT trained only with the AL data." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 4: Results for small labeled training data. Given the performance with the full dataset, we show BERT trained only with the AL data." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "df4372b2e8d9bb2039a5582f192768953b01d904" ], "worker_id": [ "c1018a31c3272ce74964a3280069f62f314a1a58" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "by exploiting discourse relations to propagate polarity from seed predicates to final sentiment polarity", "evidence": [ "In this paper, we propose a simple and effective method for learning affective events that only requires a very small seed lexicon and a large raw corpus. As illustrated in Figure FIGREF1, our key idea is that we can exploit discourse relations BIBREF4 to efficiently propagate polarity from seed predicates that directly report one's emotions (e.g., “to be glad” is positive). Suppose that events $x_1$ are $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Cause (i.e., $x_1$ causes $x_2$). If the seed lexicon suggests $x_2$ is positive, $x_1$ is also likely to be positive because it triggers the positive emotion. The fact that $x_2$ is known to be negative indicates the negative polarity of $x_1$. Similarly, if $x_1$ and $x_2$ are in the discourse relation of Concession (i.e., $x_2$ in spite of $x_1$), the reverse of $x_2$'s polarity can be propagated to $x_1$. Even if $x_2$'s polarity is not known in advance, we can exploit the tendency of $x_1$ and $x_2$ to be of the same polarity (for Cause) or of the reverse polarity (for Concession) although the heuristic is not exempt from counterexamples. We transform this idea into objective functions and train neural network models that predict the polarity of a given event." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "In this paper, we propose a simple and effective method for learning affective events that only requires a very small seed lexicon and a large raw corpus. As illustrated in Figure FIGREF1, our key idea is that we can exploit discourse relations BIBREF4 to efficiently propagate polarity from seed predicates that directly report one's emotions (e.g., “to be glad” is positive)." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "5c5bbc8af91c16af89b4ddd57ee6834be018e4e7" ], "worker_id": [ "c1018a31c3272ce74964a3280069f62f314a1a58" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "30 words", "evidence": [ "We constructed our seed lexicon consisting of 15 positive words and 15 negative words, as shown in Section SECREF27. From the corpus of about 100 million sentences, we obtained 1.4 millions event pairs for AL, 41 millions for CA, and 6 millions for CO. We randomly selected subsets of AL event pairs such that positive and negative latter events were equal in size. We also sampled event pairs for each of CA and CO such that it was five times larger than AL. The results are shown in Table TABREF16." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "We constructed our seed lexicon consisting of 15 positive words and 15 negative words, as shown in Section SECREF27. " ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "0206f2131f64a3e02498cedad1250971b78ffd0c" ], "worker_id": [ "c1018a31c3272ce74964a3280069f62f314a1a58" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [ "100 million sentences" ], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "As a raw corpus, we used a Japanese web corpus that was compiled through the procedures proposed by BIBREF13. To extract event pairs tagged with discourse relations, we used the Japanese dependency parser KNP and in-house postprocessing scripts BIBREF14. KNP used hand-written rules to segment each sentence into what we conventionally called clauses (mostly consecutive text chunks), each of which contained one main predicate. KNP also identified the discourse relations of event pairs if explicit discourse connectives BIBREF4 such as “ので” (because) and “のに” (in spite of) were present. We treated Cause/Reason (原因・理由) and Condition (条件) in the original tagset BIBREF15 as Cause and Concession (逆接) as Concession, respectively. Here is an example of event pair extraction.", "We constructed our seed lexicon consisting of 15 positive words and 15 negative words, as shown in Section SECREF27. From the corpus of about 100 million sentences, we obtained 1.4 millions event pairs for AL, 41 millions for CA, and 6 millions for CO. We randomly selected subsets of AL event pairs such that positive and negative latter events were equal in size. We also sampled event pairs for each of CA and CO such that it was five times larger than AL. The results are shown in Table TABREF16." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "As a raw corpus, we used a Japanese web corpus that was compiled through the procedures proposed by BIBREF13. ", "From the corpus of about 100 million sentences, we obtained 1.4 millions event pairs for AL, 41 millions for CA, and 6 millions for CO." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "c36bad2758c4f9866d64c357c475d370595d937f" ], "worker_id": [ "c1018a31c3272ce74964a3280069f62f314a1a58" ] } ] }
{ "caption": [ "Figure 1: An overview of our method. We focus on pairs of events, the former events and the latter events, which are connected with a discourse relation, CAUSE or CONCESSION. Dropped pronouns are indicated by brackets in English translations. We divide the event pairs into three types: AL, CA, and CO. In AL, the polarity of a latter event is automatically identified as either positive or negative, according to the seed lexicon (the positive word is colored red and the negative word blue). We propagate the latter event’s polarity to the former event. The same polarity as the latter event is used for the discourse relation CAUSE, and the reversed polarity for CONCESSION. In CA and CO, the latter event’s polarity is not known. Depending on the discourse relation, we encourage the two events’ polarities to be the same (CA) or reversed (CO). Details are given in Section 3.2.", "Table 1: Statistics of the AL, CA, and CO datasets.", "Table 2: Details of the ACP dataset.", "Table 5: Examples of polarity scores predicted by the BiGRU model trained with AL+CA+CO.", "Table 3: Performance of various models on the ACP test set.", "Table 4: Results for small labeled training data. Given the performance with the full dataset, we show BERT trained only with the AL data." ], "file": [ "2-Figure1-1.png", "4-Table1-1.png", "4-Table2-1.png", "5-Table5-1.png", "5-Table3-1.png", "5-Table4-1.png" ] }
2003.07723
PO-EMO: Conceptualization, Annotation, and Modeling of Aesthetic Emotions in German and English Poetry
Most approaches to emotion analysis regarding social media, literature, news, and other domains focus exclusively on basic emotion categories as defined by Ekman or Plutchik. However, art (such as literature) enables engagement in a broader range of more complex and subtle emotions that have been shown to also include mixed emotional responses. We consider emotions as they are elicited in the reader, rather than what is expressed in the text or intended by the author. Thus, we conceptualize a set of aesthetic emotions that are predictive of aesthetic appreciation in the reader, and allow the annotation of multiple labels per line to capture mixed emotions within context. We evaluate this novel setting in an annotation experiment both with carefully trained experts and via crowdsourcing. Our annotation with experts leads to an acceptable agreement of kappa=.70, resulting in a consistent dataset for future large scale analysis. Finally, we conduct first emotion classification experiments based on BERT, showing that identifying aesthetic emotions is challenging in our data, with up to .52 F1-micro on the German subset. Data and resources are available at https://github.com/tnhaider/poetry-emotion
{ "section_name": [ "", " ::: ", " ::: ::: ", "Introduction", "Related Work ::: Poetry in Natural Language Processing", "Related Work ::: Emotion Annotation", "Related Work ::: Emotion Classification", "Data Collection", "Data Collection ::: German", "Data Collection ::: English", "Expert Annotation", "Expert Annotation ::: Workflow", "Expert Annotation ::: Emotion Labels", "Expert Annotation ::: Agreement", "Crowdsourcing Annotation", "Crowdsourcing Annotation ::: Data and Setup", "Crowdsourcing Annotation ::: Results", "Crowdsourcing Annotation ::: Comparing Experts with Crowds", "Modeling", "Concluding Remarks", "Acknowledgements", "Appendix", "Appendix ::: Friedrich Hölderlin: Hälfte des Lebens (1804)", "Appendix ::: Georg Trakl: In den Nachmittag geflüstert (1912)", "Appendix ::: Walt Whitman: O Captain! My Captain! (1865)" ], "paragraphs": [ [ "1.1em" ], [ "1.1.1em" ], [ "1.1.1.1em", "Thomas Haider$^{1,3}$, Steffen Eger$^2$, Evgeny Kim$^3$, Roman Klinger$^3$, Winfried Menninghaus$^1$", "$^{1}$Department of Language and Literature, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics", "$^{2}$NLLG, Department of Computer Science, Technische Universitat Darmstadt", "$^{3}$Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, University of Stuttgart", "{thomas.haider, w.m}@ae.mpg.de, eger@aiphes.tu-darmstadt.de", "{roman.klinger, evgeny.kim}@ims.uni-stuttgart.de", "Most approaches to emotion analysis regarding social media, literature, news, and other domains focus exclusively on basic emotion categories as defined by Ekman or Plutchik. However, art (such as literature) enables engagement in a broader range of more complex and subtle emotions that have been shown to also include mixed emotional responses. We consider emotions as they are elicited in the reader, rather than what is expressed in the text or intended by the author. Thus, we conceptualize a set of aesthetic emotions that are predictive of aesthetic appreciation in the reader, and allow the annotation of multiple labels per line to capture mixed emotions within context. We evaluate this novel setting in an annotation experiment both with carefully trained experts and via crowdsourcing. Our annotation with experts leads to an acceptable agreement of $\\kappa =.70$, resulting in a consistent dataset for future large scale analysis. Finally, we conduct first emotion classification experiments based on BERT, showing that identifying aesthetic emotions is challenging in our data, with up to .52 F1-micro on the German subset. Data and resources are available at https://github.com/tnhaider/poetry-emotion.", "Emotion, Aesthetic Emotions, Literature, Poetry, Annotation, Corpora, Emotion Recognition, Multi-Label" ], [ "Emotions are central to human experience, creativity and behavior. Models of affect and emotion, both in psychology and natural language processing, commonly operate on predefined categories, designated either by continuous scales of, e.g., Valence, Arousal and Dominance BIBREF0 or discrete emotion labels (which can also vary in intensity). Discrete sets of emotions often have been motivated by theories of basic emotions, as proposed by Ekman1992—Anger, Fear, Joy, Disgust, Surprise, Sadness—and Plutchik1991, who added Trust and Anticipation. These categories are likely to have evolved as they motivate behavior that is directly relevant for survival. However, art reception typically presupposes a situation of safety and therefore offers special opportunities to engage in a broader range of more complex and subtle emotions. These differences between real-life and art contexts have not been considered in natural language processing work so far.", "To emotionally move readers is considered a prime goal of literature since Latin antiquity BIBREF1, BIBREF2, BIBREF3. Deeply moved readers shed tears or get chills and goosebumps even in lab settings BIBREF4. In cases like these, the emotional response actually implies an aesthetic evaluation: narratives that have the capacity to move readers are evaluated as good and powerful texts for this very reason. Similarly, feelings of suspense experienced in narratives not only respond to the trajectory of the plot's content, but are also directly predictive of aesthetic liking (or disliking). Emotions that exhibit this dual capacity have been defined as “aesthetic emotions” BIBREF2. Contrary to the negativity bias of classical emotion catalogues, emotion terms used for aesthetic evaluation purposes include far more positive than negative emotions. At the same time, many overall positive aesthetic emotions encompass negative or mixed emotional ingredients BIBREF2, e.g., feelings of suspense include both hopeful and fearful anticipations.", "For these reasons, we argue that the analysis of literature (with a focus on poetry) should rely on specifically selected emotion items rather than on the narrow range of basic emotions only. Our selection is based on previous research on this issue in psychological studies on art reception and, specifically, on poetry. For instance, knoop2016mapping found that Beauty is a major factor in poetry reception.", "We primarily adopt and adapt emotion terms that schindler2017measuring have identified as aesthetic emotions in their study on how to measure and categorize such particular affective states. Further, we consider the aspect that, when selecting specific emotion labels, the perspective of annotators plays a major role. Whether emotions are elicited in the reader, expressed in the text, or intended by the author largely changes the permissible labels. For example, feelings of Disgust or Love might be intended or expressed in the text, but the text might still fail to elicit corresponding feelings as these concepts presume a strong reaction in the reader. Our focus here was on the actual emotional experience of the readers rather than on hypothetical intentions of authors. We opted for this reader perspective based on previous research in NLP BIBREF5, BIBREF6 and work in empirical aesthetics BIBREF7, that specifically measured the reception of poetry. Our final set of emotion labels consists of Beauty/Joy, Sadness, Uneasiness, Vitality, Suspense, Awe/Sublime, Humor, Annoyance, and Nostalgia.", "In addition to selecting an adapted set of emotions, the annotation of poetry brings further challenges, one of which is the choice of the appropriate unit of annotation. Previous work considers words BIBREF8, BIBREF9, sentences BIBREF10, BIBREF11, utterances BIBREF12, sentence triples BIBREF13, or paragraphs BIBREF14 as the units of annotation. For poetry, reasonable units follow the logical document structure of poems, i.e., verse (line), stanza, and, owing to its relative shortness, the complete text. The more coarse-grained the unit, the more difficult the annotation is likely to be, but the more it may also enable the annotation of emotions in context. We find that annotating fine-grained units (lines) that are hierarchically ordered within a larger context (stanza, poem) caters to the specific structure of poems, where emotions are regularly mixed and are more interpretable within the whole poem. Consequently, we allow the mixing of emotions already at line level through multi-label annotation.", "The remainder of this paper includes (1) a report of the annotation process that takes these challenges into consideration, (2) a description of our annotated corpora, and (3) an implementation of baseline models for the novel task of aesthetic emotion annotation in poetry. In a first study, the annotators work on the annotations in a closely supervised fashion, carefully reading each verse, stanza, and poem. In a second study, the annotations are performed via crowdsourcing within relatively short time periods with annotators not seeing the entire poem while reading the stanza. Using these two settings, we aim at obtaining a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of an expert vs. crowdsourcing setting in this novel annotation task. Particularly, we are interested in estimating the potential of a crowdsourcing environment for the task of self-perceived emotion annotation in poetry, given time and cost overhead associated with in-house annotation process (that usually involve training and close supervision of the annotators).", "We provide the final datasets of German and English language poems annotated with reader emotions on verse level at https://github.com/tnhaider/poetry-emotion." ], [ "Natural language understanding research on poetry has investigated stylistic variation BIBREF15, BIBREF16, BIBREF17, with a focus on broadly accepted formal features such as meter BIBREF18, BIBREF19, BIBREF20 and rhyme BIBREF21, BIBREF22, as well as enjambement BIBREF23, BIBREF24 and metaphor BIBREF25, BIBREF26. Recent work has also explored the relationship of poetry and prose, mainly on a syntactic level BIBREF27, BIBREF28. Furthermore, poetry also lends itself well to semantic (change) analysis BIBREF29, BIBREF30, as linguistic invention BIBREF31, BIBREF32 and succinctness BIBREF33 are at the core of poetic production.", "Corpus-based analysis of emotions in poetry has been considered, but there is no work on German, and little on English. kao2015computational analyze English poems with word associations from the Harvard Inquirer and LIWC, within the categories positive/negative outlook, positive/negative emotion and phys./psych. well-being. hou-frank-2015-analyzing examine the binary sentiment polarity of Chinese poems with a weighted personalized PageRank algorithm. barros2013automatic followed a tagging approach with a thesaurus to annotate words that are similar to the words `Joy', `Anger', `Fear' and `Sadness' (moreover translating these from English to Spanish). With these word lists, they distinguish the categories `Love', `Songs to Lisi', `Satire' and `Philosophical-Moral-Religious' in Quevedo's poetry. Similarly, alsharif2013emotion classify unique Arabic `emotional text forms' based on word unigrams.", "Mohanty2018 create a corpus of 788 poems in the Indian Odia language, annotate it on text (poem) level with binary negative and positive sentiment, and are able to distinguish these with moderate success. Sreeja2019 construct a corpus of 736 Indian language poems and annotate the texts on Ekman's six categories + Love + Courage. They achieve a Fleiss Kappa of .48.", "In contrast to our work, these studies focus on basic emotions and binary sentiment polarity only, rather than addressing aesthetic emotions. Moreover, they annotate on the level of complete poems (instead of fine-grained verse and stanza-level)." ], [ "Emotion corpora have been created for different tasks and with different annotation strategies, with different units of analysis and different foci of emotion perspective (reader, writer, text). Examples include the ISEAR dataset BIBREF34 (document-level); emotion annotation in children stories BIBREF10 and news headlines BIBREF35 (sentence-level); and fine-grained emotion annotation in literature by Kim2018 (phrase- and word-level). We refer the interested reader to an overview paper on existing corpora BIBREF36.", "We are only aware of a limited number of publications which look in more depth into the emotion perspective. buechel-hahn-2017-emobank report on an annotation study that focuses both on writer's and reader's emotions associated with English sentences. The results show that the reader perspective yields better inter-annotator agreement. Yang2009 also study the difference between writer and reader emotions, but not with a modeling perspective. The authors find that positive reader emotions tend to be linked to positive writer emotions in online blogs." ], [ "The task of emotion classification has been tackled before using rule-based and machine learning approaches. Rule-based emotion classification typically relies on lexical resources of emotionally charged words BIBREF9, BIBREF37, BIBREF8 and offers a straightforward and transparent way to detect emotions in text.", "In contrast to rule-based approaches, current models for emotion classification are often based on neural networks and commonly use word embeddings as features. Schuff2017 applied models from the classes of CNN, BiLSTM, and LSTM and compare them to linear classifiers (SVM and MaxEnt), where the BiLSTM shows best results with the most balanced precision and recall. AbdulMageed2017 claim the highest F$_1$ with gated recurrent unit networks BIBREF38 for Plutchik's emotion model. More recently, shared tasks on emotion analysis BIBREF39, BIBREF40 triggered a set of more advanced deep learning approaches, including BERT BIBREF41 and other transfer learning methods BIBREF42." ], [ "For our annotation and modeling studies, we build on top of two poetry corpora (in English and German), which we refer to as PO-EMO. This collection represents important contributions to the literary canon over the last 400 years. We make this resource available in TEI P5 XML and an easy-to-use tab separated format. Table TABREF9 shows a size overview of these data sets. Figure FIGREF8 shows the distribution of our data over time via density plots. Note that both corpora show a relative underrepresentation before the onset of the romantic period (around 1750)." ], [ "The German corpus contains poems available from the website lyrik.antikoerperchen.de (ANTI-K), which provides a platform for students to upload essays about poems. The data is available in the Hypertext Markup Language, with clean line and stanza segmentation. ANTI-K also has extensive metadata, including author names, years of publication, numbers of sentences, poetic genres, and literary periods, that enable us to gauge the distribution of poems according to periods. The 158 poems we consider (731 stanzas) are dispersed over 51 authors and the New High German timeline (1575–1936 A.D.). This data has been annotated, besides emotions, for meter, rhythm, and rhyme in other studies BIBREF22, BIBREF43." ], [ "The English corpus contains 64 poems of popular English writers. It was partly collected from Project Gutenberg with the GutenTag tool, and, in addition, includes a number of hand selected poems from the modern period and represents a cross section of popular English poets. We took care to include a number of female authors, who would have been underrepresented in a uniform sample. Time stamps in the corpus are organized by the birth year of the author, as assigned in Project Gutenberg." ], [ "In the following, we will explain how we compiled and annotated three data subsets, namely, (1) 48 German poems with gold annotation. These were originally annotated by three annotators. The labels were then aggregated with majority voting and based on discussions among the annotators. Finally, they were curated to only include one gold annotation. (2) The remaining 110 German poems that are used to compute the agreement in table TABREF20 and (3) 64 English poems contain the raw annotation from two annotators.", "We report the genesis of our annotation guidelines including the emotion classes. With the intention to provide a language resource for the computational analysis of emotion in poetry, we aimed at maximizing the consistency of our annotation, while doing justice to the diversity of poetry. We iteratively improved the guidelines and the annotation workflow by annotating in batches, cleaning the class set, and the compilation of a gold standard. The final overall cost of producing this expert annotated dataset amounts to approximately 3,500." ], [ "The annotation process was initially conducted by three female university students majoring in linguistics and/or literary studies, which we refer to as our “expert annotators”. We used the INCePTION platform for annotation BIBREF44. Starting with the German poems, we annotated in batches of about 16 (and later in some cases 32) poems. After each batch, we computed agreement statistics including heatmaps, and provided this feedback to the annotators. For the first three batches, the three annotators produced a gold standard using a majority vote for each line. Where this was inconclusive, they developed an adjudicated annotation based on discussion. Where necessary, we encouraged the annotators to aim for more consistency, as most of the frequent switching of emotions within a stanza could not be reconstructed or justified.", "In poems, emotions are regularly mixed (already on line level) and are more interpretable within the whole poem. We therefore annotate lines hierarchically within the larger context of stanzas and the whole poem. Hence, we instruct the annotators to read a complete stanza or full poem, and then annotate each line in the context of its stanza. To reflect on the emotional complexity of poetry, we allow a maximum of two labels per line while avoiding heavy label fluctuations by encouraging annotators to reflect on their feelings to avoid `empty' annotations. Rather, they were advised to use fewer labels and more consistent annotation. This additional constraint is necessary to avoid “wild”, non-reconstructable or non-justified annotations.", "All subsequent batches (all except the first three) were only annotated by two out of the three initial annotators, coincidentally those two who had the lowest initial agreement with each other. We asked these two experts to use the generated gold standard (48 poems; majority votes of 3 annotators plus manual curation) as a reference (“if in doubt, annotate according to the gold standard”). This eliminated some systematic differences between them and markedly improved the agreement levels, roughly from 0.3–0.5 Cohen's $\\kappa $ in the first three batches to around 0.6–0.8 $\\kappa $ for all subsequent batches. This annotation procedure relaxes the reader perspective, as we encourage annotators (if in doubt) to annotate how they think the other annotators would annotate. However, we found that this formulation improves the usability of the data and leads to a more consistent annotation." ], [ "We opt for measuring the reader perspective rather than the text surface or author's intent. To closer define and support conceptualizing our labels, we use particular `items', as they are used in psychological self-evaluations. These items consist of adjectives, verbs or short phrases. We build on top of schindler2017measuring who proposed 43 items that were then grouped by a factor analysis based on self-evaluations of participants. The resulting factors are shown in Table TABREF17. We attempt to cover all identified factors and supplement with basic emotions BIBREF46, BIBREF47, where possible.", "We started with a larger set of labels to then delete and substitute (tone down) labels during the initial annotation process to avoid infrequent classes and inconsistencies. Further, we conflate labels if they show considerable confusion with each other. These iterative improvements particularly affected Confusion, Boredom and Other that were very infrequently annotated and had little agreement among annotators ($\\kappa <.2$). For German, we also removed Nostalgia ($\\kappa =.218$) after gold standard creation, but after consideration, added it back for English, then achieving agreement. Nostalgia is still available in the gold standard (then with a second label Beauty/Joy or Sadness to keep consistency). However, Confusion, Boredom and Other are not available in any sub-corpus.", "Our final set consists of nine classes, i.e., (in order of frequency) Beauty/Joy, Sadness, Uneasiness, Vitality, Suspense, Awe/Sublime, Humor, Annoyance, and Nostalgia. In the following, we describe the labels and give further details on the aggregation process.", "Annoyance (annoys me/angers me/felt frustrated): Annoyance implies feeling annoyed, frustrated or even angry while reading the line/stanza. We include the class Anger here, as this was found to be too strong in intensity.", "Awe/Sublime (found it overwhelming/sense of greatness): Awe/Sublime implies being overwhelmed by the line/stanza, i.e., if one gets the impression of facing something sublime or if the line/stanza inspires one with awe (or that the expression itself is sublime). Such emotions are often associated with subjects like god, death, life, truth, etc. The term Sublime originated with kant2000critique as one of the first aesthetic emotion terms. Awe is a more common English term.", "Beauty/Joy (found it beautiful/pleasing/makes me happy/joyful): kant2000critique already spoke of a “feeling of beauty”, and it should be noted that it is not a `merely pleasing emotion'. Therefore, in our pilot annotations, Beauty and Joy were separate labels. However, schindler2017measuring found that items for Beauty and Joy load into the same factors. Furthermore, our pilot annotations revealed, while Beauty is the more dominant and frequent feeling, both labels regularly accompany each other, and they often get confused across annotators. Therefore, we add Joy to form an inclusive label Beauty/Joy that increases annotation consistency.", "Humor (found it funny/amusing): Implies feeling amused by the line/stanza or if it makes one laugh.", "Nostalgia (makes me nostalgic): Nostalgia is defined as a sentimental longing for things, persons or situations in the past. It often carries both positive and negative feelings. However, since this label is quite infrequent, and not available in all subsets of the data, we annotated it with an additional Beauty/Joy or Sadness label to ensure annotation consistency.", "Sadness (makes me sad/touches me): If the line/stanza makes one feel sad. It also includes a more general `being touched / moved'.", "Suspense (found it gripping/sparked my interest): Choose Suspense if the line/stanza keeps one in suspense (if the line/stanza excites one or triggers one's curiosity). We further removed Anticipation from Suspense/Anticipation, as Anticipation appeared to us as being a more cognitive prediction whereas Suspense is a far more straightforward emotion item.", "Uneasiness (found it ugly/unsettling/disturbing / frightening/distasteful): This label covers situations when one feels discomfort about the line/stanza (if the line/stanza feels distasteful/ugly, unsettling/disturbing or frightens one). The labels Ugliness and Disgust were conflated into Uneasiness, as both are seldom felt in poetry (being inadequate/too strong/high in arousal), and typically lead to Uneasiness.", "Vitality (found it invigorating/spurs me on/inspires me): This label is meant for a line/stanza that has an inciting, encouraging effect (if the line/stanza conveys a feeling of movement, energy and vitality which animates to action). Similar terms are Activation and Stimulation." ], [ "Table TABREF20 shows the Cohen's $\\kappa $ agreement scores among our two expert annotators for each emotion category $e$ as follows. We assign each instance (a line in a poem) a binary label indicating whether or not the annotator has annotated the emotion category $e$ in question. From this, we obtain vectors $v_i^e$, for annotators $i=0,1$, where each entry of $v_i^e$ holds the binary value for the corresponding line. We then apply the $\\kappa $ statistics to the two binary vectors $v_i^e$. Additionally to averaged $\\kappa $, we report micro-F1 values in Table TABREF21 between the multi-label annotations of both expert annotators as well as the micro-F1 score of a random baseline as well as of the majority emotion baseline (which labels each line as Beauty/Joy).", "We find that Cohen $\\kappa $ agreement ranges from .84 for Uneasiness in the English data, .81 for Humor and Nostalgia, down to German Suspense (.65), Awe/Sublime (.61) and Vitality for both languages (.50 English, .63 German). Both annotators have a similar emotion frequency profile, where the ranking is almost identical, especially for German. However, for English, Annotator 2 annotates more Vitality than Uneasiness. Figure FIGREF18 shows the confusion matrices of labels between annotators as heatmaps. Notably, Beauty/Joy and Sadness are confused across annotators more often than other labels. This is topical for poetry, and therefore not surprising: One might argue that the beauty of beings and situations is only beautiful because it is not enduring and therefore not to divorce from the sadness of the vanishing of beauty BIBREF48. We also find considerable confusion of Sadness with Awe/Sublime and Vitality, while the latter is also regularly confused with Beauty/Joy.", "Furthermore, as shown in Figure FIGREF23, we find that no single poem aggregates to more than six emotion labels, while no stanza aggregates to more than four emotion labels. However, most lines and stanzas prefer one or two labels. German poems seem more emotionally diverse where more poems have three labels than two labels, while the majority of English poems have only two labels. This is however attributable to the generally shorter English texts." ], [ "After concluding the expert annotation, we performed a focused crowdsourcing experiment, based on the final label set and items as they are listed in Table TABREF27 and Section SECREF19. With this experiment, we aim to understand whether it is possible to collect reliable judgements for aesthetic perception of poetry from a crowdsourcing platform. A second goal is to see whether we can replicate the expensive expert annotations with less costly crowd annotations.", "We opted for a maximally simple annotation environment, where we asked participants to annotate English 4-line stanzas with self-perceived reader emotions. We choose English due to the higher availability of English language annotators on crowdsourcing platforms. Each annotator rates each stanza independently of surrounding context." ], [ "For consistency and to simplify the task for the annotators, we opt for a trade-off between completeness and granularity of the annotation. Specifically, we subselect stanzas composed of four verses from the corpus of 64 hand selected English poems. The resulting selection of 59 stanzas is uploaded to Figure Eight for annotation.", "The annotators are asked to answer the following questions for each instance.", "Question 1 (single-choice): Read the following stanza and decide for yourself which emotions it evokes.", "Question 2 (multiple-choice): Which additional emotions does the stanza evoke?", "The answers to both questions correspond to the emotion labels we defined to use in our annotation, as described in Section SECREF19. We add an additional answer choice “None” to Question 2 to allow annotators to say that a stanza does not evoke any additional emotions.", "Each instance is annotated by ten people. We restrict the task geographically to the United Kingdom and Ireland and set the internal parameters on Figure Eight to only include the highest quality annotators to join the task. We pay 0.09 per instance. The final cost of the crowdsourcing experiment is 74." ], [ "In the following, we determine the best aggregation strategy regarding the 10 annotators with bootstrap resampling. For instance, one could assign the label of a specific emotion to an instance if just one annotators picks it, or one could assign the label only if all annotators agree on this emotion. To evaluate this, we repeatedly pick two sets of 5 annotators each out of the 10 annotators for each of the 59 stanzas, 1000 times overall (i.e., 1000$\\times $59 times, bootstrap resampling). For each of these repetitions, we compare the agreement of these two groups of 5 annotators. Each group gets assigned with an adjudicated emotion which is accepted if at least one annotator picks it, at least two annotators pick it, etc. up to all five pick it.", "We show the results in Table TABREF27. The $\\kappa $ scores show the average agreement between the two groups of five annotators, when the adjudicated class is picked based on the particular threshold of annotators with the same label choice. We see that some emotions tend to have higher agreement scores than others, namely Annoyance (.66), Sadness (up to .52), and Awe/Sublime, Beauty/Joy, Humor (all .46). The maximum agreement is reached mostly with a threshold of 2 (4 times) or 3 (3 times).", "We further show in the same table the average numbers of labels from each strategy. Obviously, a lower threshold leads to higher numbers (corresponding to a disjunction of annotations for each emotion). The drop in label counts is comparably drastic, with on average 18 labels per class. Overall, the best average $\\kappa $ agreement (.32) is less than half of what we saw for the expert annotators (roughly .70). Crowds especially disagree on many more intricate emotion labels (Uneasiness, Vitality, Nostalgia, Suspense).", "We visualize how often two emotions are used to label an instance in a confusion table in Figure FIGREF18. Sadness is used most often to annotate a stanza, and it is often confused with Suspense, Uneasiness, and Nostalgia. Further, Beauty/Joy partially overlaps with Awe/Sublime, Nostalgia, and Sadness.", "On average, each crowd annotator uses two emotion labels per stanza (56% of cases); only in 36% of the cases the annotators use one label, and in 6% and 1% of the cases three and four labels, respectively. This contrasts with the expert annotators, who use one label in about 70% of the cases and two labels in 30% of the cases for the same 59 four-liners. Concerning frequency distribution for emotion labels, both experts and crowds name Sadness and Beauty/Joy as the most frequent emotions (for the `best' threshold of 3) and Nostalgia as one of the least frequent emotions. The Spearman rank correlation between experts and crowds is about 0.55 with respect to the label frequency distribution, indicating that crowds could replace experts to a moderate degree when it comes to extracting, e.g., emotion distributions for an author or time period. Now, we further compare crowds and experts in terms of whether crowds could replicate expert annotations also on a finer stanza level (rather than only on a distributional level)." ], [ "To gauge the quality of the crowd annotations in comparison with our experts, we calculate agreement on the emotions between experts and an increasing group size from the crowd. For each stanza instance $s$, we pick $N$ crowd workers, where $N\\in \\lbrace 4,6,8,10\\rbrace $, then pick their majority emotion for $s$, and additionally pick their second ranked majority emotion if at least $\\frac{N}{2}-1$ workers have chosen it. For the experts, we aggregate their emotion labels on stanza level, then perform the same strategy for selection of emotion labels. Thus, for $s$, both crowds and experts have 1 or 2 emotions. For each emotion, we then compute Cohen's $\\kappa $ as before. Note that, compared to our previous experiments in Section SECREF26 with a threshold, each stanza now receives an emotion annotation (exactly one or two emotion labels), both by the experts and the crowd-workers.", "In Figure FIGREF30, we plot agreement between experts and crowds on stanza level as we vary the number $N$ of crowd workers involved. On average, there is roughly a steady linear increase in agreement as $N$ grows, which may indicate that $N=20$ or $N=30$ would still lead to better agreement. Concerning individual emotions, Nostalgia is the emotion with the least agreement, as opposed to Sadness (in our sample of 59 four-liners): the agreement for this emotion grows from $.47$ $\\kappa $ with $N=4$ to $.65$ $\\kappa $ with $N=10$. Sadness is also the most frequent emotion, both according to experts and crowds. Other emotions for which a reasonable agreement is achieved are Annoyance, Awe/Sublime, Beauty/Joy, Humor ($\\kappa $ > 0.2). Emotions with little agreement are Vitality, Uneasiness, Suspense, Nostalgia ($\\kappa $ < 0.2).", "By and large, we note from Figure FIGREF18 that expert annotation is more restrictive, with experts agreeing more often on particular emotion labels (seen in the darker diagonal). The results of the crowdsourcing experiment, on the other hand, are a mixed bag as evidenced by a much sparser distribution of emotion labels. However, we note that these differences can be caused by 1) the disparate training procedure for the experts and crowds, and 2) the lack of opportunities for close supervision and on-going training of the crowds, as opposed to the in-house expert annotators.", "In general, however, we find that substituting experts with crowds is possible to a certain degree. Even though the crowds' labels look inconsistent at first view, there appears to be a good signal in their aggregated annotations, helping to approximate expert annotations to a certain degree. The average $\\kappa $ agreement (with the experts) we get from $N=10$ crowd workers (0.24) is still considerably below the agreement among the experts (0.70)." ], [ "To estimate the difficulty of automatic classification of our data set, we perform multi-label document classification (of stanzas) with BERT BIBREF41. For this experiment we aggregate all labels for a stanza and sort them by frequency, both for the gold standard and the raw expert annotations. As can be seen in Figure FIGREF23, a stanza bears a minimum of one and a maximum of four emotions. Unfortunately, the label Nostalgia is only available 16 times in the German data (the gold standard) as a second label (as discussed in Section SECREF19). None of our models was able to learn this label for German. Therefore we omit it, leaving us with eight proper labels.", "We use the code and the pre-trained BERT models of Farm, provided by deepset.ai. We test the multilingual-uncased model (Multiling), the german-base-cased model (Base), the german-dbmdz-uncased model (Dbmdz), and we tune the Base model on 80k stanzas of the German Poetry Corpus DLK BIBREF30 for 2 epochs, both on token (masked words) and sequence (next line) prediction (Base$_{\\textsc {Tuned}}$).", "We split the randomized German dataset so that each label is at least 10 times in the validation set (63 instances, 113 labels), and at least 10 times in the test set (56 instances, 108 labels) and leave the rest for training (617 instances, 946 labels). We train BERT for 10 epochs (with a batch size of 8), optimize with entropy loss, and report F1-micro on the test set. See Table TABREF36 for the results.", "We find that the multilingual model cannot handle infrequent categories, i.e., Awe/Sublime, Suspense and Humor. However, increasing the dataset with English data improves the results, suggesting that the classification would largely benefit from more annotated data. The best model overall is DBMDZ (.520), showing a balanced response on both validation and test set. See Table TABREF37 for a breakdown of all emotions as predicted by the this model. Precision is mostly higher than recall. The labels Awe/Sublime, Suspense and Humor are harder to predict than the other labels.", "The BASE and BASE$_{\\textsc {TUNED}}$ models perform slightly worse than DBMDZ. The effect of tuning of the BASE model is questionable, probably because of the restricted vocabulary (30k). We found that tuning on poetry does not show obvious improvements. Lastly, we find that models that were trained on lines (instead of stanzas) do not achieve the same F1 (~.42 for the German models)." ], [ "In this paper, we presented a dataset of German and English poetry annotated with reader response to reading poetry. We argued that basic emotions as proposed by psychologists (such as Ekman and Plutchik) that are often used in emotion analysis from text are of little use for the annotation of poetry reception. We instead conceptualized aesthetic emotion labels and showed that a closely supervised annotation task results in substantial agreement—in terms of $\\kappa $ score—on the final dataset.", "The task of collecting reader-perceived emotion response to poetry in a crowdsourcing setting is not straightforward. In contrast to expert annotators, who were closely supervised and reflected upon the task, the annotators on crowdsourcing platforms are difficult to control and may lack necessary background knowledge to perform the task at hand. However, using a larger number of crowd annotators may lead to finding an aggregation strategy with a better trade-off between quality and quantity of adjudicated labels. For future work, we thus propose to repeat the experiment with larger number of crowdworkers, and develop an improved training strategy that would suit the crowdsourcing environment.", "The dataset presented in this paper can be of use for different application scenarios, including multi-label emotion classification, style-conditioned poetry generation, investigating the influence of rhythm/prosodic features on emotion, or analysis of authors, genres and diachronic variation (e.g., how emotions are represented differently in certain periods).", "Further, though our modeling experiments are still rudimentary, we propose that this data set can be used to investigate the intra-poem relations either through multi-task learning BIBREF49 and/or with the help of hierarchical sequence classification approaches." ], [ "A special thanks goes to Gesine Fuhrmann, who created the guidelines and tirelessly documented the annotation progress. Also thanks to Annika Palm and Debby Trzeciak who annotated and gave lively feedback. For help with the conceptualization of labels we thank Ines Schindler. This research has been partially conducted within the CRETA center (http://www.creta.uni-stuttgart.de/) which is funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and partially funded by the German Research Council (DFG), projects SEAT (Structured Multi-Domain Emotion Analysis from Text, KL 2869/1-1). This work has also been supported by the German Research Foundation as part of the Research Training Group Adaptive Preparation of Information from Heterogeneous Sources (AIPHES) at the Technische Universität Darmstadt under grant No. GRK 1994/1." ], [ "We illustrate two examples of our German gold standard annotation, a poem each by Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl, and an English poem by Walt Whitman. Hölderlin's text stands out, because the mood changes starkly from the first stanza to the second, from Beauty/Joy to Sadness. Trakl's text is a bit more complex with bits of Nostalgia and, most importantly, a mixture of Uneasiness with Awe/Sublime. Whitman's poem is an example of Vitality and its mixing with Sadness. The English annotation was unified by us for space constraints. For the full annotation please see https://github.com/tnhaider/poetry-emotion/" ], [ "" ], [ "" ], [ "" ] ] }
{ "question": [ "Does the paper report macro F1?", "How is the annotation experiment evaluated?", "What are the aesthetic emotions formalized?" ], "question_id": [ "3a9d391d25cde8af3334ac62d478b36b30079d74", "8d8300d88283c73424c8f301ad9fdd733845eb47", "48b12eb53e2d507343f19b8a667696a39b719807" ], "nlp_background": [ "two", "two", "two" ], "topic_background": [ "unfamiliar", "unfamiliar", "unfamiliar" ], "paper_read": [ "no", "no", "no" ], "search_query": [ "German", "German", "German" ], "question_writer": [ "486a870694ba60f1a1e7e4ec13e328164cd4b43c", "486a870694ba60f1a1e7e4ec13e328164cd4b43c", "486a870694ba60f1a1e7e4ec13e328164cd4b43c" ], "answers": [ { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": true, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 7: Recall and precision scores of the best model (dbmdz) for each emotion on the test set. ‘Support’ signifies the number of labels." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 7: Recall and precision scores of the best model (dbmdz) for each emotion on the test set. ‘Support’ signifies the number of labels." ] }, { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": true, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "We find that the multilingual model cannot handle infrequent categories, i.e., Awe/Sublime, Suspense and Humor. However, increasing the dataset with English data improves the results, suggesting that the classification would largely benefit from more annotated data. The best model overall is DBMDZ (.520), showing a balanced response on both validation and test set. See Table TABREF37 for a breakdown of all emotions as predicted by the this model. Precision is mostly higher than recall. The labels Awe/Sublime, Suspense and Humor are harder to predict than the other labels.", "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 7: Recall and precision scores of the best model (dbmdz) for each emotion on the test set. ‘Support’ signifies the number of labels." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "See Table TABREF37 for a breakdown of all emotions as predicted by the this model.", "FLOAT SELECTED: Table 7: Recall and precision scores of the best model (dbmdz) for each emotion on the test set. ‘Support’ signifies the number of labels." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "0220672a84e5d828ec90f8ee65ab39414cd170f7", "bac3f916c426a5809d910072100fdf12ad3fc30d" ], "worker_id": [ "c1fbdd7a261021041f75fbe00a55b4c386ebbbb4", "258ee4069f740c400c0049a2580945a1cc7f044c" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [ "confusion matrices of labels between annotators" ], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "We find that Cohen $\\kappa $ agreement ranges from .84 for Uneasiness in the English data, .81 for Humor and Nostalgia, down to German Suspense (.65), Awe/Sublime (.61) and Vitality for both languages (.50 English, .63 German). Both annotators have a similar emotion frequency profile, where the ranking is almost identical, especially for German. However, for English, Annotator 2 annotates more Vitality than Uneasiness. Figure FIGREF18 shows the confusion matrices of labels between annotators as heatmaps. Notably, Beauty/Joy and Sadness are confused across annotators more often than other labels. This is topical for poetry, and therefore not surprising: One might argue that the beauty of beings and situations is only beautiful because it is not enduring and therefore not to divorce from the sadness of the vanishing of beauty BIBREF48. We also find considerable confusion of Sadness with Awe/Sublime and Vitality, while the latter is also regularly confused with Beauty/Joy." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "Figure FIGREF18 shows the confusion matrices of labels between annotators as heatmaps." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "218914b3ebf4fe7a1026f109cf02b0c3e37905b6" ], "worker_id": [ "258ee4069f740c400c0049a2580945a1cc7f044c" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [ "feelings of suspense experienced in narratives not only respond to the trajectory of the plot's content, but are also directly predictive of aesthetic liking (or disliking)", "Emotions that exhibit this dual capacity have been defined as “aesthetic emotions”" ], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "To emotionally move readers is considered a prime goal of literature since Latin antiquity BIBREF1, BIBREF2, BIBREF3. Deeply moved readers shed tears or get chills and goosebumps even in lab settings BIBREF4. In cases like these, the emotional response actually implies an aesthetic evaluation: narratives that have the capacity to move readers are evaluated as good and powerful texts for this very reason. Similarly, feelings of suspense experienced in narratives not only respond to the trajectory of the plot's content, but are also directly predictive of aesthetic liking (or disliking). Emotions that exhibit this dual capacity have been defined as “aesthetic emotions” BIBREF2. Contrary to the negativity bias of classical emotion catalogues, emotion terms used for aesthetic evaluation purposes include far more positive than negative emotions. At the same time, many overall positive aesthetic emotions encompass negative or mixed emotional ingredients BIBREF2, e.g., feelings of suspense include both hopeful and fearful anticipations." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "Deeply moved readers shed tears or get chills and goosebumps even in lab settings BIBREF4. In cases like these, the emotional response actually implies an aesthetic evaluation: narratives that have the capacity to move readers are evaluated as good and powerful texts for this very reason. Similarly, feelings of suspense experienced in narratives not only respond to the trajectory of the plot's content, but are also directly predictive of aesthetic liking (or disliking). Emotions that exhibit this dual capacity have been defined as “aesthetic emotions” BIBREF2." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "1d2fb096ab206ab6e9b50087134e1ef663a855d1" ], "worker_id": [ "258ee4069f740c400c0049a2580945a1cc7f044c" ] } ] }
{ "caption": [ "Figure 1: Temporal distribution of poetry corpora (Kernel Density Plots with bandwidth = 0.2).", "Table 1: Statistics on our poetry corpora PO-EMO.", "Table 2: Aesthetic Emotion Factors (Schindler et al., 2017).", "Table 3: Cohen’s kappa agreement levels and normalized line-level emotion frequencies for expert annotators (Nostalgia is not available in the German data).", "Table 4: Top: averaged kappa scores and micro-F1 agreement scores, taking one annotator as gold. Bottom: Baselines.", "Figure 2: Emotion cooccurrence matrices for the German and English expert annotation experiments and the English crowdsourcing experiment.", "Figure 3: Distribution of number of distinct emotion labels per logical document level in the expert-based annotation. No whole poem has more than 6 emotions. No stanza has more than 4 emotions.", "Table 5: Results obtained via boostrapping for annotation aggregation. The row Threshold shows how many people within a group of five annotators should agree on a particular emotion. The column labeled Counts shows the average number of times certain emotion was assigned to a stanza given the threshold. Cells with ‘–’ mean that neither of two groups satisfied the threshold.", "Figure 4: Agreement between experts and crowds as a function of the number N of crowd workers.", "Table 6: BERT-based multi-label classification on stanzalevel.", "Table 7: Recall and precision scores of the best model (dbmdz) for each emotion on the test set. ‘Support’ signifies the number of labels." ], "file": [ "3-Figure1-1.png", "3-Table1-1.png", "4-Table2-1.png", "4-Table3-1.png", "4-Table4-1.png", "5-Figure2-1.png", "6-Figure3-1.png", "7-Table5-1.png", "7-Figure4-1.png", "8-Table6-1.png", "8-Table7-1.png" ] }
1705.09665
Community Identity and User Engagement in a Multi-Community Landscape
A community's identity defines and shapes its internal dynamics. Our current understanding of this interplay is mostly limited to glimpses gathered from isolated studies of individual communities. In this work we provide a systematic exploration of the nature of this relation across a wide variety of online communities. To this end we introduce a quantitative, language-based typology reflecting two key aspects of a community's identity: how distinctive, and how temporally dynamic it is. By mapping almost 300 Reddit communities into the landscape induced by this typology, we reveal regularities in how patterns of user engagement vary with the characteristics of a community. Our results suggest that the way new and existing users engage with a community depends strongly and systematically on the nature of the collective identity it fosters, in ways that are highly consequential to community maintainers. For example, communities with distinctive and highly dynamic identities are more likely to retain their users. However, such niche communities also exhibit much larger acculturation gaps between existing users and newcomers, which potentially hinder the integration of the latter. More generally, our methodology reveals differences in how various social phenomena manifest across communities, and shows that structuring the multi-community landscape can lead to a better understanding of the systematic nature of this diversity.
{ "section_name": [ "Introduction", "A typology of community identity", "Overview and intuition", "Language-based formalization", "Community-level measures", "Applying the typology to Reddit", "Community identity and user retention", "Community-type and monthly retention", "Community-type and user tenure", "Community identity and acculturation", "Community identity and content affinity", "Further related work", "Conclusion and future work", "Acknowledgements" ], "paragraphs": [ [ "“If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.”", "", "— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities", "A community's identity—defined through the common interests and shared experiences of its users—shapes various facets of the social dynamics within it BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 . Numerous instances of this interplay between a community's identity and social dynamics have been extensively studied in the context of individual online communities BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 . However, the sheer variety of online platforms complicates the task of generalizing insights beyond these isolated, single-community glimpses. A new way to reason about the variation across multiple communities is needed in order to systematically characterize the relationship between properties of a community and the dynamics taking place within.", "One especially important component of community dynamics is user engagement. We can aim to understand why users join certain communities BIBREF6 , what factors influence user retention BIBREF7 , and how users react to innovation BIBREF5 . While striking patterns of user engagement have been uncovered in prior case studies of individual communities BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 , we do not know whether these observations hold beyond these cases, or when we can draw analogies between different communities. Are there certain types of communities where we can expect similar or contrasting engagement patterns?", "To address such questions quantitatively we need to provide structure to the diverse and complex space of online communities. Organizing the multi-community landscape would allow us to both characterize individual points within this space, and reason about systematic variations in patterns of user engagement across the space.", "Present work: Structuring the multi-community space. In order to systematically understand the relationship between community identityand user engagement we introduce a quantitative typology of online communities. Our typology is based on two key aspects of community identity: how distinctive—or niche—a community's interests are relative to other communities, and how dynamic—or volatile—these interests are over time. These axes aim to capture the salience of a community's identity and dynamics of its temporal evolution.", "Our main insight in implementing this typology automatically and at scale is that the language used within a community can simultaneously capture how distinctive and dynamic its interests are. This language-based approach draws on a wealth of literature characterizing linguistic variation in online communities and its relationship to community and user identity BIBREF16 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF17 , BIBREF18 , BIBREF19 . Basing our typology on language is also convenient since it renders our framework immediately applicable to a wide variety of online communities, where communication is primarily recorded in a textual format.", "Using our framework, we map almost 300 Reddit communities onto the landscape defined by the two axes of our typology (Section SECREF2 ). We find that this mapping induces conceptually sound categorizations that effectively capture key aspects of community-level social dynamics. In particular, we quantitatively validate the effectiveness of our mapping by showing that our two-dimensional typology encodes signals that are predictive of community-level rates of user retention, complementing strong activity-based features.", "Engagement and community identity. We apply our framework to understand how two important aspects of user engagement in a community—the community's propensity to retain its users (Section SECREF3 ), and its permeability to new members (Section SECREF4 )—vary according to the type of collective identity it fosters. We find that communities that are characterized by specialized, constantly-updating content have higher user retention rates, but also exhibit larger linguistic gaps that separate newcomers from established members.", "More closely examining factors that could contribute to this linguistic gap, we find that especially within distinctive communities, established users have an increased propensity to engage with the community's specialized content, compared to newcomers (Section SECREF5 ). Interestingly, while established members of distinctive communities more avidly respond to temporal updates than newcomers, in more generic communities it is the outsiders who engage more with volatile content, perhaps suggesting that such content may serve as an entry-point to the community (but not necessarily a reason to stay). Such insights into the relation between collective identity and user engagement can be informative to community maintainers seeking to better understand growth patterns within their online communities.", "More generally, our methodology stands as an example of how sociological questions can be addressed in a multi-community setting. In performing our analyses across a rich variety of communities, we reveal both the diversity of phenomena that can occur, as well as the systematic nature of this diversity." ], [ "A community's identity derives from its members' common interests and shared experiences BIBREF15 , BIBREF20 . In this work, we structure the multi-community landscape along these two key dimensions of community identity: how distinctive a community's interests are, and how dynamic the community is over time.", "We now proceed to outline our quantitative typology, which maps communities along these two dimensions. We start by providing an intuition through inspecting a few example communities. We then introduce a generalizable language-based methodology and use it to map a large set of Reddit communities onto the landscape defined by our typology of community identity." ], [ "In order to illustrate the diversity within the multi-community space, and to provide an intuition for the underlying structure captured by the proposed typology, we first examine a few example communities and draw attention to some key social dynamics that occur within them.", "We consider four communities from Reddit: in Seahawks, fans of the Seahawks football team gather to discuss games and players; in BabyBumps, expecting mothers trade advice and updates on their pregnancy; Cooking consists of recipe ideas and general discussion about cooking; while in pics, users share various images of random things (like eels and hornets). We note that these communities are topically contrasting and foster fairly disjoint user bases. Additionally, these communities exhibit varied patterns of user engagement. While Seahawks maintains a devoted set of users from month to month, pics is dominated by transient users who post a few times and then depart.", "Discussions within these communities also span varied sets of interests. Some of these interests are more specific to the community than others: risotto, for example, is seldom a discussion point beyond Cooking. Additionally, some interests consistently recur, while others are specific to a particular time: kitchens are a consistent focus point for cooking, but mint is only in season during spring. Coupling specificity and consistency we find interests such as easter, which isn't particularly specific to BabyBumps but gains prominence in that community around Easter (see Figure FIGREF3 .A for further examples).", "These specific interests provide a window into the nature of the communities' interests as a whole, and by extension their community identities. Overall, discussions in Cooking focus on topics which are highly distinctive and consistently recur (like risotto). In contrast, discussions in Seahawks are highly dynamic, rapidly shifting over time as new games occur and players are traded in and out. In the remainder of this section we formally introduce a methodology for mapping communities in this space defined by their distinctiveness and dynamicity (examples in Figure FIGREF3 .B)." ], [ "Our approach follows the intuition that a distinctive community will use language that is particularly specific, or unique, to that community. Similarly, a dynamic community will use volatile language that rapidly changes across successive windows of time. To capture this intuition automatically, we start by defining word-level measures of specificity and volatility. We then extend these word-level primitives to characterize entire comments, and the community itself.", "Our characterizations of words in a community are motivated by methodology from prior literature that compares the frequency of a word in a particular setting to its frequency in some background distribution, in order to identify instances of linguistic variation BIBREF21 , BIBREF19 . Our particular framework makes this comparison by way of pointwise mutual information (PMI).", "In the following, we use INLINEFORM0 to denote one community within a set INLINEFORM1 of communities, and INLINEFORM2 to denote one time period within the entire history INLINEFORM3 of INLINEFORM4 . We account for temporal as well as inter-community variation by computing word-level measures for each time period of each community's history, INLINEFORM5 . Given a word INLINEFORM6 used within a particular community INLINEFORM7 at time INLINEFORM8 , we define two word-level measures:", "Specificity. We quantify the specificity INLINEFORM0 of INLINEFORM1 to INLINEFORM2 by calculating the PMI of INLINEFORM3 and INLINEFORM4 , relative to INLINEFORM5 , INLINEFORM6 ", "where INLINEFORM0 is INLINEFORM1 's frequency in INLINEFORM2 . INLINEFORM3 is specific to INLINEFORM4 if it occurs more frequently in INLINEFORM5 than in the entire set INLINEFORM6 , hence distinguishing this community from the rest. A word INLINEFORM7 whose occurrence is decoupled from INLINEFORM8 , and thus has INLINEFORM9 close to 0, is said to be generic.", "We compute values of INLINEFORM0 for each time period INLINEFORM1 in INLINEFORM2 ; in the above description we drop the time-based subscripts for clarity.", "Volatility. We quantify the volatility INLINEFORM0 of INLINEFORM1 to INLINEFORM2 as the PMI of INLINEFORM3 and INLINEFORM4 relative to INLINEFORM5 , the entire history of INLINEFORM6 : INLINEFORM7 ", "A word INLINEFORM0 is volatile at time INLINEFORM1 in INLINEFORM2 if it occurs more frequently at INLINEFORM3 than in the entire history INLINEFORM4 , behaving as a fad within a small window of time. A word that occurs with similar frequency across time, and hence has INLINEFORM5 close to 0, is said to be stable.", "Extending to utterances. Using our word-level primitives, we define the specificity of an utterance INLINEFORM0 in INLINEFORM1 , INLINEFORM2 as the average specificity of each word in the utterance. The volatility of utterances is defined analogously.", "" ], [ "Having described these word-level measures, we now proceed to establish the primary axes of our typology:", "Distinctiveness. A community with a very distinctive identity will tend to have distinctive interests, expressed through specialized language. Formally, we define the distinctiveness of a community INLINEFORM0 as the average specificity of all utterances in INLINEFORM1 . We refer to a community with a less distinctive identity as being generic.", "Dynamicity. A highly dynamic community constantly shifts interests from one time window to another, and these temporal variations are reflected in its use of volatile language. Formally, we define the dynamicity of a community INLINEFORM0 as the average volatility of all utterances in INLINEFORM1 . We refer to a community whose language is relatively consistent throughout time as being stable.", "In our subsequent analyses, we focus mostly on examing the average distinctiveness and dynamicity of a community over time, denoted INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1 ." ], [ "We now explain how our typology can be applied to the particular setting of Reddit, and describe the overall behaviour of our linguistic axes in this context.", "Dataset description. Reddit is a popular website where users form and participate in discussion-based communities called subreddits. Within these communities, users post content—such as images, URLs, or questions—which often spark vibrant lengthy discussions in thread-based comment sections.", "The website contains many highly active subreddits with thousands of active subscribers. These communities span an extremely rich variety of topical interests, as represented by the examples described earlier. They also vary along a rich multitude of structural dimensions, such as the number of users, the amount of conversation and social interaction, and the social norms determining which types of content become popular. The diversity and scope of Reddit's multicommunity ecosystem make it an ideal landscape in which to closely examine the relation between varying community identities and social dynamics.", "Our full dataset consists of all subreddits on Reddit from January 2013 to December 2014, for which there are at least 500 words in the vocabulary used to estimate our measures, in at least 4 months of the subreddit's history. We compute our measures over the comments written by users in a community in time windows of months, for each sufficiently active month, and manually remove communities where the bulk of the contributions are in a foreign language. This results in 283 communities ( INLINEFORM0 ), for a total of 4,872 community-months ( INLINEFORM1 ).", "Estimating linguistic measures. We estimate word frequencies INLINEFORM0 , and by extension each downstream measure, in a carefully controlled manner in order to ensure we capture robust and meaningful linguistic behaviour. First, we only consider top-level comments which are initial responses to a post, as the content of lower-level responses might reflect conventions of dialogue more than a community's high-level interests. Next, in order to prevent a few highly active users from dominating our frequency estimates, we count each unique word once per user, ignoring successive uses of the same word by the same user. This ensures that our word-level characterizations are not skewed by a small subset of highly active contributors.", "In our subsequent analyses, we will only look at these measures computed over the nouns used in comments. In principle, our framework can be applied to any choice of vocabulary. However, in the case of Reddit using nouns provides a convenient degree of interpretability. We can easily understand the implication of a community preferentially mentioning a noun such as gamer or feminist, but interpreting the overuse of verbs or function words such as take or of is less straightforward. Additionally, in focusing on nouns we adopt the view emphasized in modern “third wave” accounts of sociolinguistic variation, that stylistic variation is inseparable from topical content BIBREF23 . In the case of online communities, the choice of what people choose to talk about serves as a primary signal of social identity. That said, a typology based on more purely stylistic differences is an interesting avenue for future work.", "Accounting for rare words. One complication when using measures such as PMI, which are based off of ratios of frequencies, is that estimates for very infrequent words could be overemphasized BIBREF24 . Words that only appear a few times in a community tend to score at the extreme ends of our measures (e.g. as highly specific or highly generic), obfuscating the impact of more frequent words in the community. To address this issue, we discard the long tail of infrequent words in our analyses, using only the top 5th percentile of words, by frequency within each INLINEFORM0 , to score comments and communities.", "Typology output on Reddit. The distribution of INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1 across Reddit communities is shown in Figure FIGREF3 .B, along with examples of communities at the extremes of our typology. We find that interpretable groupings of communities emerge at various points within our axes. For instance, highly distinctive and dynamic communities tend to focus on rapidly-updating interests like sports teams and games, while generic and consistent communities tend to be large “link-sharing” hubs where users generally post content with no clear dominating themes. More examples of communities at the extremes of our typology are shown in Table TABREF9 .", "We note that these groupings capture abstract properties of a community's content that go beyond its topic. For instance, our typology relates topically contrasting communities such as yugioh (which is about a popular trading card game) and Seahawks through the shared trait that their content is particularly distinctive. Additionally, the axes can clarify differences between topically similar communities: while startrek and thewalkingdead both focus on TV shows, startrek is less dynamic than the median community, while thewalkingdead is among the most dynamic communities, as the show was still airing during the years considered." ], [ "We have seen that our typology produces qualitatively satisfying groupings of communities according to the nature of their collective identity. This section shows that there is an informative and highly predictive relationship between a community's position in this typology and its user engagement patterns. We find that communities with distinctive and dynamic identities have higher rates of user engagement, and further show that a community's position in our identity-based landscape holds important predictive information that is complementary to a strong activity baseline.", "In particular user retention is one of the most crucial aspects of engagement and is critical to community maintenance BIBREF2 . We quantify how successful communities are at retaining users in terms of both short and long-term commitment. Our results indicate that rates of user retention vary drastically, yet systematically according to how distinctive and dynamic a community is (Figure FIGREF3 ).", "We find a strong, explanatory relationship between the temporal consistency of a community's identity and rates of user engagement: dynamic communities that continually update and renew their discussion content tend to have far higher rates of user engagement. The relationship between distinctiveness and engagement is less universal, but still highly informative: niche communities tend to engender strong, focused interest from users at one particular point in time, though this does not necessarily translate into long-term retention." ], [ "We find that dynamic communities, such as Seahawks or starcraft, have substantially higher rates of monthly user retention than more stable communities (Spearman's INLINEFORM0 = 0.70, INLINEFORM1 0.001, computed with community points averaged over months; Figure FIGREF11 .A, left). Similarly, more distinctive communities, like Cooking and Naruto, exhibit moderately higher monthly retention rates than more generic communities (Spearman's INLINEFORM2 = 0.33, INLINEFORM3 0.001; Figure FIGREF11 .A, right).", "Monthly retention is formally defined as the proportion of users who contribute in month INLINEFORM0 and then return to contribute again in month INLINEFORM1 . Each monthly datapoint is treated as unique and the trends in Figure FIGREF11 show 95% bootstrapped confidence intervals, cluster-resampled at the level of subreddit BIBREF25 , to account for differences in the number of months each subreddit contributes to the data.", "Importantly, we find that in the task of predicting community-level user retention our identity-based typology holds additional predictive value on top of strong baseline features based on community-size (# contributing users) and activity levels (mean # contributions per user), which are commonly used for churn prediction BIBREF7 . We compared out-of-sample predictive performance via leave-one-community-out cross validation using random forest regressors with ensembles of size 100, and otherwise default hyperparameters BIBREF26 . A model predicting average monthly retention based on a community's average distinctiveness and dynamicity achieves an average mean squared error ( INLINEFORM0 ) of INLINEFORM1 and INLINEFORM2 , while an analogous model predicting based on a community's size and average activity level (both log-transformed) achieves INLINEFORM4 and INLINEFORM5 . The difference between the two models is not statistically significant ( INLINEFORM6 , Wilcoxon signed-rank test). However, combining features from both models results in a large and statistically significant improvement over each independent model ( INLINEFORM7 , INLINEFORM8 , INLINEFORM9 Bonferroni-corrected pairwise Wilcoxon tests). These results indicate that our typology can explain variance in community-level retention rates, and provides information beyond what is present in standard activity-based features." ], [ "As with monthly retention, we find a strong positive relationship between a community's dynamicity and the average number of months that a user will stay in that community (Spearman's INLINEFORM0 = 0.41, INLINEFORM1 0.001, computed over all community points; Figure FIGREF11 .B, left). This verifies that the short-term trend observed for monthly retention translates into longer-term engagement and suggests that long-term user retention might be strongly driven by the extent to which a community continually provides novel content. Interestingly, there is no significant relationship between distinctiveness and long-term engagement (Spearman's INLINEFORM2 = 0.03, INLINEFORM3 0.77; Figure FIGREF11 .B, right). Thus, while highly distinctive communities like RandomActsOfMakeup may generate focused commitment from users over a short period of time, such communities are unlikely to retain long-term users unless they also have sufficiently dynamic content.", "To measure user tenures we focused on one slice of data (May, 2013) and measured how many months a user spends in each community, on average—the average number of months between a user's first and last comment in each community. We have activity data up until May 2015, so the maximum tenure is 24 months in this set-up, which is exceptionally long relative to the average community member (throughout our entire data less than INLINEFORM0 of users have tenures of more than 24 months in any community)." ], [ "The previous section shows that there is a strong connection between the nature of a community's identity and its basic user engagement patterns. In this section, we probe the relationship between a community's identity and how permeable, or accessible, it is to outsiders.", "We measure this phenomenon using what we call the acculturation gap, which compares the extent to which engaged vs. non-engaged users employ community-specific language. While previous work has found this gap to be large and predictive of future user engagement in two beer-review communities BIBREF5 , we find that the size of the acculturation gap depends strongly on the nature of a community's identity, with the gap being most pronounced in stable, highly distinctive communities (Figure FIGREF13 ).", "This finding has important implications for our understanding of online communities. Though many works have analyzed the dynamics of “linguistic belonging” in online communities BIBREF16 , BIBREF28 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF17 , our results suggest that the process of linguistically fitting in is highly contingent on the nature of a community's identity. At one extreme, in generic communities like pics or worldnews there is no distinctive, linguistic identity for users to adopt.", "To measure the acculturation gap for a community, we follow Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al danescu-niculescu-mizilno2013 and build “snapshot language models” (SLMs) for each community, which capture the linguistic state of a community at one point of time. Using these language models we can capture how linguistically close a particular utterance is to the community by measuring the cross-entropy of this utterance relative to the SLM: DISPLAYFORM0 ", "where INLINEFORM0 is the probability assigned to bigram INLINEFORM1 from comment INLINEFORM2 in community-month INLINEFORM3 . We build the SLMs by randomly sampling 200 active users—defined as users with at least 5 comments in the respective community and month. For each of these 200 active users we select 5 random 10-word spans from 5 unique comments. To ensure robustness and maximize data efficiency, we construct 100 SLMs for each community-month pair that has enough data, bootstrap-resampling from the set of active users.", "We compute a basic measure of the acculturation gap for a community-month INLINEFORM0 as the relative difference of the cross-entropy of comments by users active in INLINEFORM1 with that of singleton comments by outsiders—i.e., users who only ever commented once in INLINEFORM2 , but who are still active in Reddit in general: DISPLAYFORM0 ", " INLINEFORM0 denotes the distribution over singleton comments, INLINEFORM1 denotes the distribution over comments from users active in INLINEFORM2 , and INLINEFORM3 the expected values of the cross-entropy over these respective distributions. For each bootstrap-sampled SLM we compute the cross-entropy of 50 comments by active users (10 comments from 5 randomly sampled active users, who were not used to construct the SLM) and 50 comments from randomly-sampled outsiders.", "Figure FIGREF13 .A shows that the acculturation gap varies substantially with how distinctive and dynamic a community is. Highly distinctive communities have far higher acculturation gaps, while dynamicity exhibits a non-linear relationship: relatively stable communities have a higher linguistic `entry barrier', as do very dynamic ones. Thus, in communities like IAmA (a general Q&A forum) that are very generic, with content that is highly, but not extremely dynamic, outsiders are at no disadvantage in matching the community's language. In contrast, the acculturation gap is large in stable, distinctive communities like Cooking that have consistent community-specific language. The gap is also large in extremely dynamic communities like Seahawks, which perhaps require more attention or interest on the part of active users to keep up-to-date with recent trends in content.", "These results show that phenomena like the acculturation gap, which were previously observed in individual communities BIBREF28 , BIBREF5 , cannot be easily generalized to a larger, heterogeneous set of communities. At the same time, we see that structuring the space of possible communities enables us to observe systematic patterns in how such phenomena vary." ], [ "Through the acculturation gap, we have shown that communities exhibit large yet systematic variations in their permeability to outsiders. We now turn to understanding the divide in commenting behaviour between outsiders and active community members at a finer granularity, by focusing on two particular ways in which such gaps might manifest among users: through different levels of engagement with specific content and with temporally volatile content.", "Echoing previous results, we find that community type mediates the extent and nature of the divide in content affinity. While in distinctive communities active members have a higher affinity for both community-specific content and for highly volatile content, the opposite is true for generic communities, where it is the outsiders who engage more with volatile content.", "We quantify these divides in content affinity by measuring differences in the language of the comments written by active users and outsiders. Concretely, for each community INLINEFORM0 , we define the specificity gap INLINEFORM1 as the relative difference between the average specificity of comments authored by active members, and by outsiders, where these measures are macroaveraged over users. Large, positive INLINEFORM2 then occur in communities where active users tend to engage with substantially more community-specific content than outsiders.", "We analogously define the volatility gap INLINEFORM0 as the relative difference in volatilities of active member and outsider comments. Large, positive values of INLINEFORM1 characterize communities where active users tend to have more volatile interests than outsiders, while negative values indicate communities where active users tend to have more stable interests.", "We find that in 94% of communities, INLINEFORM0 , indicating (somewhat unsurprisingly) that in almost all communities, active users tend to engage with more community-specific content than outsiders. However, the magnitude of this divide can vary greatly: for instance, in Homebrewing, which is dedicated to brewing beer, the divide is very pronounced ( INLINEFORM1 0.33) compared to funny, a large hub where users share humorous content ( INLINEFORM2 0.011).", "The nature of the volatility gap is comparatively more varied. In Homebrewing ( INLINEFORM0 0.16), as in 68% of communities, active users tend to write more volatile comments than outsiders ( INLINEFORM1 0). However, communities like funny ( INLINEFORM2 -0.16), where active users contribute relatively stable comments compared to outsiders ( INLINEFORM3 0), are also well-represented on Reddit.", "To understand whether these variations manifest systematically across communities, we examine the relationship between divides in content affinity and community type. In particular, following the intuition that active users have a relatively high affinity for a community's niche, we expect that the distinctiveness of a community will be a salient mediator of specificity and volatility gaps. Indeed, we find a strong correlation between a community's distinctiveness and its specificity gap (Spearman's INLINEFORM0 0.34, INLINEFORM1 0.001).", "We also find a strong correlation between distinctiveness and community volatility gaps (Spearman's INLINEFORM0 0.53, INLINEFORM1 0.001). In particular, we see that among the most distinctive communities (i.e., the top third of communities by distinctiveness), active users tend to write more volatile comments than outsiders (mean INLINEFORM2 0.098), while across the most generic communities (i.e., the bottom third), active users tend to write more stable comments (mean INLINEFORM3 -0.047, Mann-Whitney U test INLINEFORM4 0.001). The relative affinity of outsiders for volatile content in these communities indicates that temporally ephemeral content might serve as an entry point into such a community, without necessarily engaging users in the long term." ], [ "Our language-based typology and analysis of user engagement draws on and contributes to several distinct research threads, in addition to the many foundational studies cited in the previous sections.", "Multicommunity studies. Our investigation of user engagement in multicommunity settings follows prior literature which has examined differences in user and community dynamics across various online groups, such as email listservs. Such studies have primarily related variations in user behaviour to structural features such as group size and volume of content BIBREF30 , BIBREF31 , BIBREF32 , BIBREF33 . In focusing on the linguistic content of communities, we extend this research by providing a content-based framework through which user engagement can be examined.", "Reddit has been a particularly useful setting for studying multiple communities in prior work. Such studies have mostly focused on characterizing how individual users engage across a multi-community platform BIBREF34 , BIBREF35 , or on specific user engagement patterns such as loyalty to particular communities BIBREF22 . We complement these studies by seeking to understand how features of communities can mediate a broad array of user engagement patterns within them.", "Typologies of online communities. Prior attempts to typologize online communities have primarily been qualitative and based on hand-designed categories, making them difficult to apply at scale. These typologies often hinge on having some well-defined function the community serves, such as supporting a business or non-profit cause BIBREF36 , which can be difficult or impossible to identify in massive, anonymous multi-community settings. Other typologies emphasize differences in communication platforms and other functional requirements BIBREF37 , BIBREF38 , which are important but preclude analyzing differences between communities within the same multi-community platform. Similarly, previous computational methods of characterizing multiple communities have relied on the presence of markers such as affixes in community names BIBREF35 , or platform-specific affordances such as evaluation mechanisms BIBREF39 .", "Our typology is also distinguished from community detection techniques that rely on structural or functional categorizations BIBREF40 , BIBREF41 . While the focus of those studies is to identify and characterize sub-communities within a larger social network, our typology provides a characterization of pre-defined communities based on the nature of their identity.", "Broader work on collective identity. Our focus on community identity dovetails with a long line of research on collective identity and user engagement, in both online and offline communities BIBREF42 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 . These studies focus on individual-level psychological manifestations of collective (or social) identity, and their relationship to user engagement BIBREF42 , BIBREF43 , BIBREF44 , BIBREF0 .", "In contrast, we seek to characterize community identities at an aggregate level and in an interpretable manner, with the goal of systematically organizing the diverse space of online communities. Typologies of this kind are critical to these broader, social-psychological studies of collective identity: they allow researchers to systematically analyze how the psychological manifestations and implications of collective identity vary across diverse sets of communities." ], [ "Our current understanding of engagement patterns in online communities is patched up from glimpses offered by several disparate studies focusing on a few individual communities. This work calls into attention the need for a method to systematically reason about similarities and differences across communities. By proposing a way to structure the multi-community space, we find not only that radically contrasting engagement patterns emerge in different parts of this space, but also that this variation can be at least partly explained by the type of identity each community fosters.", "Our choice in this work is to structure the multi-community space according to a typology based on community identity, as reflected in language use. We show that this effectively explains cross-community variation of three different user engagement measures—retention, acculturation and content affinity—and complements measures based on activity and size with additional interpretable information. For example, we find that in niche communities established members are more likely to engage with volatile content than outsiders, while the opposite is true in generic communities. Such insights can be useful for community maintainers seeking to understand engagement patterns in their own communities.", "One main area of future research is to examine the temporal dynamics in the multi-community landscape. By averaging our measures of distinctiveness and dynamicity across time, our present study treated community identity as a static property. However, as communities experience internal changes and respond to external events, we can expect the nature of their identity to shift as well. For instance, the relative consistency of harrypotter may be disrupted by the release of a new novel, while Seahawks may foster different identities during and between football seasons. Conversely, a community's type may also mediate the impact of new events. Moving beyond a static view of community identity could enable us to better understand how temporal phenomena such as linguistic change manifest across different communities, and also provide a more nuanced view of user engagement—for instance, are communities more welcoming to newcomers at certain points in their lifecycle?", "Another important avenue of future work is to explore other ways of mapping the landscape of online communities. For example, combining structural properties of communities BIBREF40 with topical information BIBREF35 and with our identity-based measures could further characterize and explain variations in user engagement patterns. Furthermore, extending the present analyses to even more diverse communities supported by different platforms (e.g., GitHub, StackExchange, Wikipedia) could enable the characterization of more complex behavioral patterns such as collaboration and altruism, which become salient in different multicommunity landscapes." ], [ "The authors thank Liye Fu, Jack Hessel, David Jurgens and Lillian Lee for their helpful comments. This research has been supported in part by a Discovery and Innovation Research Seed Award from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research at Cornell, NSF CNS-1010921, IIS-1149837, IIS-1514268 NIH BD2K, ARO MURI, DARPA XDATA, DARPA SIMPLEX, DARPA NGS2, Stanford Data Science Initiative, SAP Stanford Graduate Fellowship, NSERC PGS-D, Boeing, Lightspeed, and Volkswagen. " ] ] }
{ "question": [ "Do they report results only on English data?", "How do the various social phenomena examined manifest in different types of communities?", "What patterns do they observe about how user engagement varies with the characteristics of a community?", "How did the select the 300 Reddit communities for comparison?", "How do the authors measure how temporally dynamic a community is?", "How do the authors measure how distinctive a community is?" ], "question_id": [ "003f884d3893532f8c302431c9f70be6f64d9be8", "bb97537a0a7c8f12a3f65eba73cefa6abcd2f2b2", "eea089baedc0ce80731c8fdcb064b82f584f483a", "edb2d24d6d10af13931b3a47a6543bd469752f0c", "938cf30c4f1d14fa182e82919e16072fdbcf2a82", "93f4ad6568207c9bd10d712a52f8de25b3ebadd4" ], "nlp_background": [ "five", "five", "five", "five", "five", "five" ], "topic_background": [ "", "", "", "", "", "" ], "paper_read": [ "", "", "", "", "", "" ], "search_query": [ "", "", "", "", "", "" ], "question_writer": [ "e8b24c3133e0bec0a6465e1f13acd3a5ed816b37", "e8b24c3133e0bec0a6465e1f13acd3a5ed816b37", "e8b24c3133e0bec0a6465e1f13acd3a5ed816b37", "e8b24c3133e0bec0a6465e1f13acd3a5ed816b37", "e8b24c3133e0bec0a6465e1f13acd3a5ed816b37", "e8b24c3133e0bec0a6465e1f13acd3a5ed816b37" ], "answers": [ { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": false, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "Our full dataset consists of all subreddits on Reddit from January 2013 to December 2014, for which there are at least 500 words in the vocabulary used to estimate our measures, in at least 4 months of the subreddit's history. We compute our measures over the comments written by users in a community in time windows of months, for each sufficiently active month, and manually remove communities where the bulk of the contributions are in a foreign language. This results in 283 communities ( INLINEFORM0 ), for a total of 4,872 community-months ( INLINEFORM1 )." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "We compute our measures over the comments written by users in a community in time windows of months, for each sufficiently active month, and manually remove communities where the bulk of the contributions are in a foreign language. " ] }, { "unanswerable": true, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [], "highlighted_evidence": [] } ], "annotation_id": [ "04ae0cc420f69540ca11707ab8ecc07a89f803f7", "31d8f8ed7ba40b27c480f7caf7cfb48fba47bb07" ], "worker_id": [ "c1018a31c3272ce74964a3280069f62f314a1a58", "34c35a1877e453ecaebcf625df3ef788e1953cc4" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "Dynamic communities have substantially higher rates of monthly user retention than more stable communities. More distinctive communities exhibit moderately higher monthly retention rates than more generic communities. There is also a strong positive relationship between a community's dynamicity and the average number of months that a user will stay in that community - a short-term trend observed for monthly retention translates into longer-term engagement and suggests that long-term user retention might be strongly driven by the extent to which a community continually provides novel content.\n", "evidence": [ "We find that dynamic communities, such as Seahawks or starcraft, have substantially higher rates of monthly user retention than more stable communities (Spearman's INLINEFORM0 = 0.70, INLINEFORM1 0.001, computed with community points averaged over months; Figure FIGREF11 .A, left). Similarly, more distinctive communities, like Cooking and Naruto, exhibit moderately higher monthly retention rates than more generic communities (Spearman's INLINEFORM2 = 0.33, INLINEFORM3 0.001; Figure FIGREF11 .A, right).", "As with monthly retention, we find a strong positive relationship between a community's dynamicity and the average number of months that a user will stay in that community (Spearman's INLINEFORM0 = 0.41, INLINEFORM1 0.001, computed over all community points; Figure FIGREF11 .B, left). This verifies that the short-term trend observed for monthly retention translates into longer-term engagement and suggests that long-term user retention might be strongly driven by the extent to which a community continually provides novel content. Interestingly, there is no significant relationship between distinctiveness and long-term engagement (Spearman's INLINEFORM2 = 0.03, INLINEFORM3 0.77; Figure FIGREF11 .B, right). Thus, while highly distinctive communities like RandomActsOfMakeup may generate focused commitment from users over a short period of time, such communities are unlikely to retain long-term users unless they also have sufficiently dynamic content." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "We find that dynamic communities, such as Seahawks or starcraft, have substantially higher rates of monthly user retention than more stable communities (Spearman's INLINEFORM0 = 0.70, INLINEFORM1 0.001, computed with community points averaged over months; Figure FIGREF11 .A, left). Similarly, more distinctive communities, like Cooking and Naruto, exhibit moderately higher monthly retention rates than more generic communities (Spearman's INLINEFORM2 = 0.33, INLINEFORM3 0.001; Figure FIGREF11 .A, right).", "As with monthly retention, we find a strong positive relationship between a community's dynamicity and the average number of months that a user will stay in that community (Spearman's INLINEFORM0 = 0.41, INLINEFORM1 0.001, computed over all community points; Figure FIGREF11 .B, left). This verifies that the short-term trend observed for monthly retention translates into longer-term engagement and suggests that long-term user retention might be strongly driven by the extent to which a community continually provides novel content. Interestingly, there is no significant relationship between distinctiveness and long-term engagement (Spearman's INLINEFORM2 = 0.03, INLINEFORM3 0.77; Figure FIGREF11 .B, right). Thus, while highly distinctive communities like RandomActsOfMakeup may generate focused commitment from users over a short period of time, such communities are unlikely to retain long-term users unless they also have sufficiently dynamic content." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "8a080f37fbbb5c6700422a346b944ef535fa725b" ], "worker_id": [ "34c35a1877e453ecaebcf625df3ef788e1953cc4" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [ "communities that are characterized by specialized, constantly-updating content have higher user retention rates, but also exhibit larger linguistic gaps that separate newcomers from established members", "within distinctive communities, established users have an increased propensity to engage with the community's specialized content, compared to newcomers " ], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "Engagement and community identity. We apply our framework to understand how two important aspects of user engagement in a community—the community's propensity to retain its users (Section SECREF3 ), and its permeability to new members (Section SECREF4 )—vary according to the type of collective identity it fosters. We find that communities that are characterized by specialized, constantly-updating content have higher user retention rates, but also exhibit larger linguistic gaps that separate newcomers from established members.", "More closely examining factors that could contribute to this linguistic gap, we find that especially within distinctive communities, established users have an increased propensity to engage with the community's specialized content, compared to newcomers (Section SECREF5 ). Interestingly, while established members of distinctive communities more avidly respond to temporal updates than newcomers, in more generic communities it is the outsiders who engage more with volatile content, perhaps suggesting that such content may serve as an entry-point to the community (but not necessarily a reason to stay). Such insights into the relation between collective identity and user engagement can be informative to community maintainers seeking to better understand growth patterns within their online communities." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "We find that communities that are characterized by specialized, constantly-updating content have higher user retention rates, but also exhibit larger linguistic gaps that separate newcomers from established members.", "More closely examining factors that could contribute to this linguistic gap, we find that especially within distinctive communities, established users have an increased propensity to engage with the community's specialized content, compared to newcomers (Section SECREF5 ). " ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "f64ff06cfd16f9bd339512a6e85f0a7bc8b670f4" ], "worker_id": [ "34c35a1877e453ecaebcf625df3ef788e1953cc4" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "They selected all the subreddits from January 2013 to December 2014 with at least 500 words in the vocabulary and at least 4 months of the subreddit's history. They also removed communities with the bulk of the contributions are in foreign language.", "evidence": [ "Our full dataset consists of all subreddits on Reddit from January 2013 to December 2014, for which there are at least 500 words in the vocabulary used to estimate our measures, in at least 4 months of the subreddit's history. We compute our measures over the comments written by users in a community in time windows of months, for each sufficiently active month, and manually remove communities where the bulk of the contributions are in a foreign language. This results in 283 communities ( INLINEFORM0 ), for a total of 4,872 community-months ( INLINEFORM1 )." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "Our full dataset consists of all subreddits on Reddit from January 2013 to December 2014, for which there are at least 500 words in the vocabulary used to estimate our measures, in at least 4 months of the subreddit's history. We compute our measures over the comments written by users in a community in time windows of months, for each sufficiently active month, and manually remove communities where the bulk of the contributions are in a foreign language. " ] }, { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "They collect subreddits from January 2013 to December 2014,2 for which there are at\nleast 500 words in the vocabulary used to estimate the measures,\nin at least 4 months of the subreddit’s history. They compute our measures over the comments written by users in a community in time windows of months, for each sufficiently active month, and manually remove communities where the bulk of the contributions are in a foreign language.", "evidence": [ "Our full dataset consists of all subreddits on Reddit from January 2013 to December 2014, for which there are at least 500 words in the vocabulary used to estimate our measures, in at least 4 months of the subreddit's history. We compute our measures over the comments written by users in a community in time windows of months, for each sufficiently active month, and manually remove communities where the bulk of the contributions are in a foreign language. This results in 283 communities ( INLINEFORM0 ), for a total of 4,872 community-months ( INLINEFORM1 )." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "Our full dataset consists of all subreddits on Reddit from January 2013 to December 2014, for which there are at least 500 words in the vocabulary used to estimate our measures, in at least 4 months of the subreddit's history. We compute our measures over the comments written by users in a community in time windows of months, for each sufficiently active month, and manually remove communities where the bulk of the contributions are in a foreign language. This results in 283 communities ( INLINEFORM0 ), for a total of 4,872 community-months ( INLINEFORM1 )." ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "2c804f9b9543e3b085fbd1fff87f0fde688f1484", "78de92427e9e37b0dfdc19f57b735e65cec40e0a" ], "worker_id": [ "c1018a31c3272ce74964a3280069f62f314a1a58", "34c35a1877e453ecaebcf625df3ef788e1953cc4" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [ "the average volatility of all utterances" ], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "Dynamicity. A highly dynamic community constantly shifts interests from one time window to another, and these temporal variations are reflected in its use of volatile language. Formally, we define the dynamicity of a community INLINEFORM0 as the average volatility of all utterances in INLINEFORM1 . We refer to a community whose language is relatively consistent throughout time as being stable." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ ". A highly dynamic community constantly shifts interests from one time window to another, and these temporal variations are reflected in its use of volatile language. Formally, we define the dynamicity of a community INLINEFORM0 as the average volatility of all utterances in INLINEFORM1 . " ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "62d30e963bf86e9b2d454adbd4b2c4dc3107cd11" ], "worker_id": [ "34c35a1877e453ecaebcf625df3ef788e1953cc4" ] }, { "answer": [ { "unanswerable": false, "extractive_spans": [ " the average specificity of all utterances" ], "yes_no": null, "free_form_answer": "", "evidence": [ "Distinctiveness. A community with a very distinctive identity will tend to have distinctive interests, expressed through specialized language. Formally, we define the distinctiveness of a community INLINEFORM0 as the average specificity of all utterances in INLINEFORM1 . We refer to a community with a less distinctive identity as being generic." ], "highlighted_evidence": [ "A community with a very distinctive identity will tend to have distinctive interests, expressed through specialized language. Formally, we define the distinctiveness of a community INLINEFORM0 as the average specificity of all utterances in INLINEFORM1 " ] } ], "annotation_id": [ "21484dfac315192bb69aee597ebf5d100ff5925b" ], "worker_id": [ "34c35a1877e453ecaebcf625df3ef788e1953cc4" ] } ] }
{ "caption": [ "Figure 1: A: Within a community certain words are more community-specific and temporally volatile than others. For instance, words like onesies are highly specific to the BabyBumps community (top left corner), while words like easter are temporally ephemeral. B: Extending these word-level measures to communities, we can measure the overall distinctiveness and dynamicity of a community, which are highly associated with user retention rates (colored heatmap; see Section 3). Communities like Seahawks (a football team) and Cooking use highly distinctive language. Moreover, Seahawks uses very dynamic language, as the discussion continually shifts throughout the football season. In contrast, the content of Cooking remains stable over time, as does the content of pics; though these communities do have ephemeral fads, the overall themes discussed generally remain stable.", "Table 1: Examples of communities on Reddit which occur at the extremes (top and bottom quartiles) of our typology.", "Figure 2: A: The monthly retention rate for communities differs drastically according to their position in our identity-based typology, with dynamicity being the strongest signal of higher user retention (x-axes bin community-months by percentiles; in all subsequent plots, error bars indicate 95% bootstrapped confidence intervals). B: Dynamicity also correlates with long-term user retention, measured as the number of months the average user spends in the community; however, distinctiveness does not correlate with this longer-term variant of user retention.", "Figure 3: A: There is substantial variation in the direction and magnitude of the acculturation gap, which quantifies the extent to which established members of a community are linguistically differentiated from outsiders. Among 60% of communities this gap is positive, indicating that established users match the community’s language more than outsiders. B: The size of the acculturation gap varies systematically according to how dynamic and distinctive a community is. Distinctive communities exhibit larger gaps; as do relatively stable, and very dynamic communities." ], "file": [ "3-Figure1-1.png", "4-Table1-1.png", "5-Figure2-1.png", "6-Figure3-1.png" ] }
1908.06606
Question Answering based Clinical Text Structuring Using Pre-trained Language Model
"Clinical text structuring is a critical and fundamental task for clinical research. Traditional met(...TRUNCATED)
{"section_name":["Introduction","Related Work ::: Clinical Text Structuring","Related Work ::: Pre-t(...TRUNCATED)
{"question":["What data is the language model pretrained on?","What baselines is the proposed model (...TRUNCATED)
{"caption":["Fig. 1. An illustrative example of QA-CTS task.","TABLE I AN ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE OF NA(...TRUNCATED)
1811.00942
Progress and Tradeoffs in Neural Language Models
"In recent years, we have witnessed a dramatic shift towards techniques driven by neural networks fo(...TRUNCATED)
{"section_name":["Introduction","Background and Related Work","Experimental Setup","Hyperparameters (...TRUNCATED)
{"question":["What aspects have been compared between various language models?","what classic langua(...TRUNCATED)
{"caption":["Table 1: Comparison of neural language models on Penn Treebank and WikiText-103.","Figu(...TRUNCATED)
1805.02400
Stay On-Topic: Generating Context-specific Fake Restaurant Reviews
"Automatically generated fake restaurant reviews are a threat to online review systems. Recent resea(...TRUNCATED)
{"section_name":["Introduction","Background","System Model","Attack Model","Generative Model"],"para(...TRUNCATED)
{"question":["Which dataset do they use a starting point in generating fake reviews?","Do they use a(...TRUNCATED)
{"caption":["Fig. 1: Näıve text generation with NMT vs. generation using our NTM model. Repetitiv(...TRUNCATED)
1907.05664
Saliency Maps Generation for Automatic Text Summarization
"Saliency map generation techniques are at the forefront of explainable AI literature for a broad ra(...TRUNCATED)
{"section_name":["Introduction","The Task and the Model","Dataset and Training Task","The Model","Ob(...TRUNCATED)
{"question":["Which baselines did they compare?","How many attention layers are there in their model(...TRUNCATED)
{"caption":["Figure 2: Representation of the propagation of the relevance from the output to the inp(...TRUNCATED)
1910.14497
Probabilistic Bias Mitigation in Word Embeddings
"It has been shown that word embeddings derived from large corpora tend to incorporate biases presen(...TRUNCATED)
{"section_name":["Introduction","Background ::: Geometric Bias Mitigation","Background ::: Geometric(...TRUNCATED)
{"question":["How is embedding quality assessed?","What are the three measures of bias which are red(...TRUNCATED)
{"caption":["Figure 1: Word embedding semantic quality benchmarks for each bias mitigation method (h(...TRUNCATED)
1912.02481
Massive vs. Curated Word Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages. The Case of Yor\`ub\'a and Twi
"The success of several architectures to learn semantic representations from unannotated text and th(...TRUNCATED)
{"section_name":["Introduction","Related Work","Languages under Study ::: Yorùbá","Languages under(...TRUNCATED)
{"question":["What turn out to be more important high volume or high quality data?","How much is mod(...TRUNCATED)
{"caption":["Table 1: Summary of the corpora used in the analysis. The last 3 columns indicate in wh(...TRUNCATED)
1810.04528
Is there Gender bias and stereotype in Portuguese Word Embeddings?
"In this work, we propose an analysis of the presence of gender bias associated with professions in (...TRUNCATED)
{"section_name":["Introduction","Related Work","Portuguese Embedding","Proposed Approach","Experimen(...TRUNCATED)
{"question":["Does this paper target European or Brazilian Portuguese?","What were the word embeddin(...TRUNCATED)
{"caption":["Fig. 1. Proposal","Fig. 2. Extreme Analogies"],"file":["3-Figure1-1.png","5-Figure2-1.p(...TRUNCATED)

Dataset Card for Qasper

Dataset Summary

QASPER is a dataset for question answering on scientific research papers. It consists of 5,049 questions over 1,585 Natural Language Processing papers. Each question is written by an NLP practitioner who read only the title and abstract of the corresponding paper, and the question seeks information present in the full text. The questions are then answered by a separate set of NLP practitioners who also provide supporting evidence to answers.

Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

  • question-answering: The dataset can be used to train a model for Question Answering. Success on this task is typically measured by achieving a high F1 score. The official baseline model currently achieves 33.63 Token F1 score & uses Longformer. This task has an active leaderboard which can be found here

  • evidence-selection: The dataset can be used to train a model for Evidence Selection. Success on this task is typically measured by achieving a high F1 score. The official baseline model currently achieves 39.37 F1 score & uses Longformer. This task has an active leaderboard which can be found here

Languages

English, as it is used in research papers.

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

A typical instance in the dataset:

{
  'id': "Paper ID (string)",
  'title': "Paper Title",
  'abstract': "paper abstract ...",
  'full_text': {
      'paragraphs':[["section1_paragraph1_text","section1_paragraph2_text",...],["section2_paragraph1_text","section2_paragraph2_text",...]],
      'section_name':["section1_title","section2_title"],...},
  'qas': {
  'answers':[{
      'annotation_id': ["q1_answer1_annotation_id","q1_answer2_annotation_id"]
      'answer': [{
          'unanswerable':False,
          'extractive_spans':["q1_answer1_extractive_span1","q1_answer1_extractive_span2"],
          'yes_no':False,
          'free_form_answer':"q1_answer1",
          'evidence':["q1_answer1_evidence1","q1_answer1_evidence2",..],
          'highlighted_evidence':["q1_answer1_highlighted_evidence1","q1_answer1_highlighted_evidence2",..]
          },
          {
          'unanswerable':False,
          'extractive_spans':["q1_answer2_extractive_span1","q1_answer2_extractive_span2"],
          'yes_no':False,
          'free_form_answer':"q1_answer2",
          'evidence':["q1_answer2_evidence1","q1_answer2_evidence2",..],
          'highlighted_evidence':["q1_answer2_highlighted_evidence1","q1_answer2_highlighted_evidence2",..]
          }],
      'worker_id':["q1_answer1_worker_id","q1_answer2_worker_id"]
      },{...["question2's answers"]..},{...["question3's answers"]..}],
  'question':["question1","question2","question3"...],
  'question_id':["question1_id","question2_id","question3_id"...],
  'question_writer':["question1_writer_id","question2_writer_id","question3_writer_id"...],
  'nlp_background':["question1_writer_nlp_background","question2_writer_nlp_background",...],
  'topic_background':["question1_writer_topic_background","question2_writer_topic_background",...],
  'paper_read': ["question1_writer_paper_read_status","question2_writer_paper_read_status",...],
  'search_query':["question1_search_query","question2_search_query","question3_search_query"...],
  }
}

Data Fields

The following is an excerpt from the dataset README:

Within "qas", some fields should be obvious. Here is some explanation about the others:

Fields specific to questions:

  • "nlp_background" shows the experience the question writer had. The values can be "zero" (no experience), "two" (0 - 2 years of experience), "five" (2 - 5 years of experience), and "infinity" (> 5 years of experience). The field may be empty as well, indicating the writer has chosen not to share this information.

  • "topic_background" shows how familiar the question writer was with the topic of the paper. The values are "unfamiliar", "familiar", "research" (meaning that the topic is the research area of the writer), or null.

  • "paper_read", when specified shows whether the questionwriter has read the paper.

  • "search_query", if not empty, is the query the question writer used to find the abstract of the paper from a large pool of abstracts we made available to them.

Fields specific to answers

Unanswerable answers have "unanswerable" set to true. The remaining answers have exactly one of the following fields being non-empty.

  • "extractive_spans" are spans in the paper which serve as the answer.
  • "free_form_answer" is a written out answer.
  • "yes_no" is true iff the answer is Yes, and false iff the answer is No.

"evidence" is the set of paragraphs, figures or tables used to arrive at the answer. Tables or figures start with the string "FLOAT SELECTED"

"highlighted_evidence" is the set of sentences the answer providers selected as evidence if they chose textual evidence. The text in the "evidence" field is a mapping from these sentences to the paragraph level. That is, if you see textual evidence in the "evidence" field, it is guaranteed to be entire paragraphs, while that is not the case with "highlighted_evidence".

Data Splits

Train Valid
Number of papers 888 281
Number of questions 2593 1005
Number of answers 2675 1764

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

[More Information Needed]

Source Data

NLP papers: The full text of the papers is extracted from S2ORC (Lo et al., 2020)

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

[More Information Needed]

Who are the source language producers?

[More Information Needed]

Annotations

[More Information Needed]

Annotation process

[More Information Needed]

Who are the annotators?

"The annotators are NLP practitioners, not expert researchers, and it is likely that an expert would score higher"

Personal and Sensitive Information

[More Information Needed]

Considerations for Using the Data

Social Impact of Dataset

[More Information Needed]

Discussion of Biases

[More Information Needed]

Other Known Limitations

[More Information Needed]

Additional Information

Dataset Curators

Crowdsourced NLP practitioners

Licensing Information

CC BY 4.0

Citation Information

@inproceedings{Dasigi2021ADO,
  title={A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers},
  author={Pradeep Dasigi and Kyle Lo and Iz Beltagy and Arman Cohan and Noah A. Smith and Matt Gardner},
  year={2021}
}

Contributions

Thanks to @cceyda for adding this dataset.

Downloads last month
2,402

Models trained or fine-tuned on allenai/qasper