“Big data pragmatics!” or “Putting the ACL in computational social science”

36 Pages·2015·2.5 MB·English

“Big data pragmatics!”

or

“Putting the ACL in computational social science”

or
If you think these title alternatives could turn people on,
turn people off,
or otherwise have an effect,
this talk might be for you.

Lillian Lee, Cornell University
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee
The one equation in this talk

Lots of on-line conversations
(Facebook, Twitter, ...;YouTube comments...; Yelp reviews...;...)
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Many systems with humans and language as key components
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Fantastic opportunities for NLP + the social sciences
to build better systems and learn more about people
A sampling
Lexical diffusion:
Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O’Connor,
Noah Smith, Eric P. Xing, 2014.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0113114
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se Power relationships from language:
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T
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Language matching and ed
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community engagement: T
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Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C
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Bob West, Dan Jurafsky, n
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Jure Leskovec, Chris Potts. k
Best paper, WWW 2013.
“Lillian”
What about the effect of language choice?
One aspect of phrasing: framing
The framing of an arguments emphasizes certain principles or perspectives.
“One of the most important concepts in the study of public opinion” [James
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Druckman, 2001] :/
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Hedging and framing in GMO debates: Eunsol Choi, Chenhao Tan, Lillian Lee, Cristian br
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Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jennifer Spindel 2012 in
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"green revolution" "Frankenfood" co
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Other “*ACL” framing work includes: Viet-An Nguyen, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Philip Resnik 2013; ifie
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Eric Baumer, Elisha Elovic, Ying Qin, Francesca Polletta, Geri Gay, 2015. -fo
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Past research: phrasing may not matter
Daniel Hopkins, SSRN 2013: “...there is no evidence that groups
targeted by specific frames [such as ‘death panels’ in the health care
debates] respond accordingly.”

Justin Grimmer, Solomon Messing, Sean Westwood, The Impression of
Influence, 2014: total number of messages mattered more than amount of
money the messages described.
!
Either Sasa Petrovic, Miles Osborne, or Victor Lavrenko, slashdot 2014:
“...a famous person can write anything and it will be retweeted.
An unknown person can write the same tweet and it will be ignored.”
Purely hypothetical NAACL Board meeting
I knew I should have said “arf”.
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“Hal”
“CCB”
“me”
Still, can wording alone be influential?
Non-options: Have better ideas.
(Instantaneously) become alpha dog.
Be a dog at all.
“Parallel universe” experimental paradigm
Exploit situations with many instances of:
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conveying the same info... d
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...varying their wording (beyond a fixed set 81
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of lexical choices) t/
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and see the effects.
Relates to work on style (e.g., Annie Louis and Ani Nenkova, 2013 ) and paraphrasing
(e.g., Wei Xu, Alan Ritter, Chris Callison-Burch, Bill Dolan, Yangfeng Ji, 2014 )
Outline
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Memorability and cultural penetration: w
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Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg, lic
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Lillian Lee, ACL 2012 om
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itter-tweet-tw Chenhao Tan, Lillian Lee, Bo Pang, ACL 2014 photostream
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• Chenhao Tan, Lillian Lee, ACL (short) 2014 g fasi.cobserve
• Chenhao Tan, Lillian Lee, work in progress m/wr.com
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Other *ACL work includes: Marco Guerini, Gödze Ötzbal, Carlo Strapparava, 2015
Tim Althoff, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Dan Jurafsky 2014.
Aside on presentation style
Paraphrasing Stuart Shieber:
Your goal is not to convince people that you are brilliant, but
that your solution is trivial.

!
It takes a certain strength of character to take that as one's goal.
!

!
Purely hypothetical reviewing situation
“There is very little substance to this paper.
!
There are no new applications or techniques.”

“me” & “my coauthors” “WSDM” submission reviewer