arXiv subjects

Jake Ryland Williams

Publications and source records attributed to Jake Ryland Williams.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Bit Cipher -- A Simple yet Powerful Word Representation System that Integrates Efficiently with Language Models

While Large Language Models (LLMs) become ever more dominant, classic pre-trained word embeddings sustain their relevance through computational efficiency and nuanced linguistic interpretation. Drawing from recent studies demonstrating that the convergence of GloVe and word2vec optimizations all tend towards log-co-occurrence matrix variants, we construct a novel word representation system called Bit-cipher that eliminates the need of backpropagation while leveraging contextual information and hyper-efficient dimensionality reduction techniques based on unigram frequency, providing strong interpretability, alongside efficiency. We use the bit-cipher algorithm to train word vectors via a two-step process that critically relies on a hyperparameter -- bits -- that controls the vector dimension. While the first step trains the bit-cipher, the second utilizes it under two different aggregation modes -- summation or concatenation -- to produce contextually rich representations from word co-occurrences. We extend our investigation into bit-cipher's efficacy, performing probing experiments on part-of-speech (POS) tagging and named entity recognition (NER) to assess its competitiveness with classic embeddings like word2vec and GloVe. Additionally, we explore its applicability in LM training and fine-tuning. By replacing embedding layers with cipher embeddings, our experiments illustrate the notable efficiency of cipher in accelerating the training process and attaining better optima compared to conventional training paradigms. Experiments on the integration of bit-cipher embedding layers with Roberta, T5, and OPT, prior to or as a substitute for fine-tuning, showcase a promising enhancement to transfer learning, allowing rapid model convergence while preserving competitive performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Reducing the Need for Backpropagation and Discovering Better Optima With Explicit Optimizations of Neural Networks

Iterative differential approximation methods that rely upon backpropagation have enabled the optimization of neural networks; however, at present, they remain computationally expensive, especially when training models at scale. In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient alternative for optimizing neural networks that can both reduce the costs of scaling neural networks and provide high-efficiency optimizations for low-resource applications. We derive an explicit solution to a simple feed-forward language model (LM) by mathematically analyzing its gradients. This solution generalizes from single-layer LMs to the class of all single-layer feed-forward softmax-activated neural models trained on positive-valued features, as is demonstrated by our extension of this solution application to MNIST digit classification. For both LM and digit classifiers, we find computationally that explicit solutions perform near-optimality in experiments showing that 1) iterative optimization only marginally improves the explicit solution parameters and 2) randomly initialized parameters iteratively optimize towards the explicit solution. We also preliminarily apply the explicit solution locally by layer in multi-layer networks and discuss how the solution's computational savings increase with model complexity -- for both single- and mult-layer applications of the explicit solution, we emphasize that the optima achieved cannot be reached by backpropagation alone, i.e., better optima appear discoverable only after explicit solutions are applied. Finally, we discuss the solution's computational savings alongside its impact on model interpretability and suggest future directions for the derivation of explicit solutions to complex- and multi-layer architectures.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Explicit Foundation Model Optimization with Self-Attentive Feed-Forward Neural Units

Iterative approximation methods using backpropagation enable the optimization of neural networks, but they remain computationally expensive, especially when used at scale. This paper presents an efficient alternative for optimizing neural networks that reduces the costs of scaling neural networks and provides high-efficiency optimizations for low-resource applications. We will discuss a general result about feed-forward neural networks and then extend this solution to compositional (mult-layer) networks, which are applied to a simplified transformer block containing feed-forward and self-attention layers. These models are used to train highly-specified and complex multi-layer neural architectures that we refer to as self-attentive feed-forward unit (SAFFU) layers, which we use to develop a transformer that appears to generalize well over small, cognitively-feasible, volumes of data. Testing demonstrates explicit solutions outperform models optimized by backpropagation alone. Moreover, further application of backpropagation after explicit solutions leads to better optima from smaller scales of data, training effective models from much less data is enabled by explicit solution warm starts. We then carry out ablation experiments training a roadmap of about 250 transformer models over 1-million tokens to determine ideal settings. We find that multiple different architectural variants produce highly-performant models, and discover from this ablation that some of the best are not the most parameterized. This appears to indicate well-generalized models could be reached using less data by using explicit solutions, and that architectural exploration using explicit solutions pays dividends in guiding the search for efficient variants with fewer parameters, and which could be incorporated into low-resource hardware where AI might be embodied.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Which tweets 'deserve' to be included in news stories? Chronemics of tweet embedding

The use and selection of user-generated social media content, specifically tweets, as a news source has become an integral part of news production practice. Yet, the mapping and the extent of the nature of the practices in which news outlets integrate social media use are still lacking. This study focuses on the pressures of immediacy on the media ecosystems, i.e., as organizational practices of news outlets that make choices related to social media content integration. By analyzing a large corpora of news outlets that have embedded tweets, this study analyzes tweet embedding practices by specifically focusing on the concept of chronemics, conceptualized here as the time needed to embed tweets. Temporal constraints are particularly pressing for journalistic practices, given the continuous pressures of the 24/7 news cycle. We ask two main questions: which types of outlets are quicker to embed tweets, and which types of users' tweets are more likely to be embedded quickly?

cs.SI↗

arXiv2022

EigenNoise: A Contrastive Prior to Warm-Start Representations

In this work, we present a naive initialization scheme for word vectors based on a dense, independent co-occurrence model and provide preliminary results that suggest it is competitive and warrants further investigation. Specifically, we demonstrate through information-theoretic minimum description length (MDL) probing that our model, EigenNoise, can approach the performance of empirically trained GloVe despite the lack of any pre-training data (in the case of EigenNoise). We present these preliminary results with interest to set the stage for further investigations into how this competitive initialization works without pre-training data, as well as to invite the exploration of more intelligent initialization schemes informed by the theory of harmonic linguistic structure. Our application of this theory likewise contributes a novel (and effective) interpretation of recent discoveries which have elucidated the underlying distributional information that linguistic representations capture from data and contrast distributions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

To Know by the Company Words Keep and What Else Lies in the Vicinity

The development of state-of-the-art (SOTA) Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems has steadily been establishing new techniques to absorb the statistics of linguistic data. These techniques often trace well-known constructs from traditional theories, and we study these connections to close gaps around key NLP methods as a means to orient future work. For this, we introduce an analytic model of the statistics learned by seminal algorithms (including GloVe and Word2Vec), and derive insights for systems that use these algorithms and the statistics of co-occurrence, in general. In this work, we derive -- to the best of our knowledge -- the first known solution to Word2Vec's softmax-optimized, skip-gram algorithm. This result presents exciting potential for future development as a direct solution to a deep learning (DL) language model's (LM's) matrix factorization. However, we use the solution to demonstrate a seemingly-universal existence of a property that word vectors exhibit and which allows for the prophylactic discernment of biases in data -- prior to their absorption by DL models. To qualify our work, we conduct an analysis of independence, i.e., on the density of statistical dependencies in co-occurrence models, which in turn renders insights on the distributional hypothesis' partial fulfillment by co-occurrence statistics.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

NewsTweet: A Dataset of Social Media Embedding in Online Journalism

The inclusion of social media posts---tweets, in particular---in digital news stories, both as commentary and increasingly as news sources, has become commonplace in recent years. In order to study this phenomenon with sufficient depth, robust large-scale data collection from both news publishers and social media platforms is necessary. This work describes the construction of such a data pipeline. In the data collected from Google News, 13% of all stories were found to include embedded tweets, with sports and entertainment news containing the largest volumes of them. Public figures and celebrities are found to dominate these stories; however, relatively unknown users have also been found to achieve newsworthiness. The collected data set, NewsTweet, and the associated pipeline for acquisition stand to engender a wave of new inquiries into social content embedding from multiple research communities.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Investigating Coordinated 'Social' Targeting of High-Profile Twitter Accounts

Following the 2016 US presidential election, there has been an increased focus on politically-motivated manipulation of mass-user behavior on social media platforms. Since a large volume of political discussion occurs on these platforms, identifying malicious activity and coordinated campaigns is essential to ensuring a robust democratic environment. Twitter has become a critical communication channel for politicians and other public figures, enabling them to maintain a direct relationship with supporters. However, the platform has been fertile ground for large-scale malicious activity. As the 2020 U.S. presidential election approaches, we have developed tools to monitor follower dynamics of some of the most prominent Twitter users, including U.S. presidential candidates. We investigate numerous, strange phenomena, such as dramatic spike and saw-tooth waveforms on follower-count charts; cohorts of user accounts which 'circulate', i.e., re-follow high profile accounts numerous times; and other 'resurrected' accounts, which have recently re-engaged on Twitter after years of non-activity. So through various analyses in these contexts, we reveal multiple, coordinated 'social' targeting campaigns aimed at affecting the outcomes of socially critical events through the use of networks of social automations (bots), often optimizing their social capital through 'compromised' accounts, which have--unbeknownst to the greater world--been hijacked.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

A general solution to the preferential selection model

We provide a general analytic solution to Herbert Simon's 1955 model for time-evolving novelty functions. This has far-reaching consequences: Simon's is a pre-cursor model for Barabasi's 1999 preferential attachment model for growing social networks, and our general abstraction of it more considers attachment to be a form of link selection. We show that any system which can be modeled as instances of types---i.e., occurrence data (frequencies)---can be generatively modeled (and simulated) from a distributional perspective with an exceptionally high-degree of accuracy.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2017

A Computational Framework for Multi-Modal Social Action Identification

We create a computational framework for understanding social action and demonstrate how this framework can be used to build an open-source event detection tool with scalable statistical machine learning algorithms and a subsampled database of over 600 million geo-tagged Tweets from around the world. These Tweets were collected between April 1st, 2014 and April 30th, 2015, most notably when the Black Lives Matter movement began. We demonstrate how these methods can be used diagnostically-by researchers, government officials and the public-to understand peaceful and violent collective action at very fine-grained levels of time and geography.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2017

Is space a word, too?

For words, rank-frequency distributions have long been heralded for adherence to a potentially-universal phenomenon known as Zipf's law. The hypothetical form of this empirical phenomenon was refined by Benîot Mandelbrot to that which is presently referred to as the Zipf-Mandelbrot law. Parallel to this, Herbet Simon proposed a selection model potentially explaining Zipf's law. However, a significant dispute between Simon and Mandelbrot, notable empirical exceptions, and the lack of a strong empirical connection between Simon's model and the Zipf-Mandelbrot law have left the questions of universality and mechanistic generation open. We offer a resolution to these issues by exhibiting how the dark matter of word segmentation, i.e., space, punctuation, etc., connect the Zipf-Mandelbrot law to Simon's mechanistic process. This explains Mandelbrot's refinement as no more than a fudge factor, accommodating the effects of the exclusion of the rank-frequency dark matter. Thus, integrating these non-word objects resolves a more-generalized rank-frequency law. Since this relies upon the integration of space, etc., we find support for the hypothesis that $all$ are generated by common processes, indicating from a physical perspective that space is a word, too.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Boundary-based MWE segmentation with text partitioning

This work presents a fine-grained, text-chunking algorithm designed for the task of multiword expressions (MWEs) segmentation. As a lexical class, MWEs include a wide variety of idioms, whose automatic identification are a necessity for the handling of colloquial language. This algorithm's core novelty is its use of non-word tokens, i.e., boundaries, in a bottom-up strategy. Leveraging boundaries refines token-level information, forging high-level performance from relatively basic data. The generality of this model's feature space allows for its application across languages and domains. Experiments spanning 19 different languages exhibit a broadly-applicable, state-of-the-art model. Evaluation against recent shared-task data places text partitioning as the overall, best performing MWE segmentation algorithm, covering all MWE classes and multiple English domains (including user-generated text). This performance, coupled with a non-combinatorial, fast-running design, produces an ideal combination for implementations at scale, which are facilitated through the release of open-source software.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Simon's fundamental rich-get-richer model entails a dominant first-mover advantage

Herbert Simon's classic rich-get-richer model is one of the simplest empirically supported mechanisms capable of generating heavy-tail size distributions for complex systems. Simon argued analytically that a population of flavored elements growing by either adding a novel element or randomly replicating an existing one would afford a distribution of group sizes with a power-law tail. Here, we show that, in fact, Simon's model does not produce a simple power law size distribution as the initial element has a dominant first-mover advantage, and will be overrepresented by a factor proportional to the inverse of the innovation probability. The first group's size discrepancy cannot be explained away as a transient of the model, and may therefore be many orders of magnitude greater than expected. We demonstrate how Simon's analysis was correct but incomplete, and expand our alternate analysis to quantify the variability of long term rankings for all groups. We find that the expected time for a first replication is infinite, and show how an incipient group must break the mechanism to improve their odds of success. We present an example of citation counts for a specific field that demonstrates a first-mover advantage consistent with our revised view of the rich-get-richer mechanism. Our findings call for a reexamination of preceding work invoking Simon's model and provide an expanded understanding going forward.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2016

Benchmarking sentiment analysis methods for large-scale texts: A case for using continuum-scored words and word shift graphs

The emergence and global adoption of social media has rendered possible the real-time estimation of population-scale sentiment, bearing profound implications for our understanding of human behavior. Given the growing assortment of sentiment measuring instruments, comparisons between them are evidently required. Here, we perform detailed tests of 6 dictionary-based methods applied to 4 different corpora, and briefly examine a further 20 methods. We show that a dictionary-based method will only perform both reliably and meaningfully if (1) the dictionary covers a sufficiently large enough portion of a given text's lexicon when weighted by word usage frequency; and (2) words are scored on a continuous scale.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Zipf's law is a consequence of coherent language production

The task of text segmentation may be undertaken at many levels in text analysis---paragraphs, sentences, words, or even letters. Here, we focus on a relatively fine scale of segmentation, hypothesizing it to be in accord with a stochastic model of language generation, as the smallest scale where independent units of meaning are produced. Our goals in this letter include the development of methods for the segmentation of these minimal independent units, which produce feature-representations of texts that align with the independence assumption of the bag-of-terms model, commonly used for prediction and classification in computational text analysis. We also propose the measurement of texts' association (with respect to realized segmentations) to the model of language generation. We find (1) that our segmentations of phrases exhibit much better associations to the generation model than words and (2), that texts which are well fit are generally topically homogeneous. Because our generative model produces Zipf's law, our study further suggests that Zipf's law may be a consequence of homogeneity in language production.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Sifting Robotic from Organic Text: A Natural Language Approach for Detecting Automation on Twitter

Twitter, a popular social media outlet, has evolved into a vast source of linguistic data, rich with opinion, sentiment, and discussion. Due to the increasing popularity of Twitter, its perceived potential for exerting social influence has led to the rise of a diverse community of automatons, commonly referred to as bots. These inorganic and semi-organic Twitter entities can range from the benevolent (e.g., weather-update bots, help-wanted-alert bots) to the malevolent (e.g., spamming messages, advertisements, or radical opinions). Existing detection algorithms typically leverage meta-data (time between tweets, number of followers, etc.) to identify robotic accounts. Here, we present a powerful classification scheme that exclusively uses the natural language text from organic users to provide a criterion for identifying accounts posting automated messages. Since the classifier operates on text alone, it is flexible and may be applied to any textual data beyond the Twitter-sphere.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Vaporous Marketing: Uncovering Pervasive Electronic Cigarette Advertisements on Twitter

Background: Twitter has become the "wild-west" of marketing and promotional strategies for advertisement agencies. Electronic cigarettes have been heavily marketed across Twitter feeds, offering discounts, "kid-friendly" flavors, algorithmically generated false testimonials, and free samples. Methods:All electronic cigarette keyword related tweets from a 10% sample of Twitter spanning January 2012 through December 2014 (approximately 850,000 total tweets) were identified and categorized as Automated or Organic by combining a keyword classification and a machine trained Human Detection algorithm. A sentiment analysis using Hedonometrics was performed on Organic tweets to quantify the change in consumer sentiments over time. Commercialized tweets were topically categorized with key phrasal pattern matching. Results:The overwhelming majority (80%) of tweets were classified as automated or promotional in nature. The majority of these tweets were coded as commercialized (83.65% in 2013), up to 33% of which offered discounts or free samples and appeared on over a billion twitter feeds as impressions. The positivity of Organic (human) classified tweets has decreased over time (5.84 in 2013 to 5.77 in 2014) due to a relative increase in the negative words ban,tobacco,doesn't,drug,against,poison,tax and a relative decrease in the positive words like haha,good,cool. Automated tweets are more positive than organic (6.17 versus 5.84) due to a relative increase in the marketing words best,win,buy,sale,health,discount and a relative decrease in negative words like bad, hate, stupid, don't. Conclusions:Due to the youth presence on Twitter and the clinical uncertainty of the long term health complications of electronic cigarette consumption, the protection of public health warrants scrutiny and potential regulation of social media marketing.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2015

Identifying missing dictionary entries with frequency-conserving context models

In an effort to better understand meaning from natural language texts, we explore methods aimed at organizing lexical objects into contexts. A number of these methods for organization fall into a family defined by word ordering. Unlike demographic or spatial partitions of data, these collocation models are of special importance for their universal applicability. While we are interested here in text and have framed our treatment appropriately, our work is potentially applicable to other areas of research (e.g., speech, genomics, and mobility patterns) where one has ordered categorical data, (e.g., sounds, genes, and locations). Our approach focuses on the phrase (whether word or larger) as the primary meaning-bearing lexical unit and object of study. To do so, we employ our previously developed framework for generating word-conserving phrase-frequency data. Upon training our model with the Wiktionary---an extensive, online, collaborative, and open-source dictionary that contains over 100,000 phrasal-definitions---we develop highly effective filters for the identification of meaningful, missing phrase-entries. With our predictions we then engage the editorial community of the Wiktionary and propose short lists of potential missing entries for definition, developing a breakthrough, lexical extraction technique, and expanding our knowledge of the defined English lexicon of phrases.

cs.CL↗