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Saif M. Mohammad

Publications and source records attributed to Saif M. Mohammad.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)

We present the first Africentric SemEval Shared task, Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval) - The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023. AfriSenti-SemEval is a sentiment classification challenge in 14 African languages: Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yorùbá (Muhammad et al., 2023), using data labeled with 3 sentiment classes. We present three subtasks: (1) Task A: monolingual classification, which received 44 submissions; (2) Task B: multilingual classification, which received 32 submissions; and (3) Task C: zero-shot classification, which received 34 submissions. The best performance for tasks A and B was achieved by NLNDE team with 71.31 and 75.06 weighted F1, respectively. UCAS-IIE-NLP achieved the best average score for task C with 58.15 weighted F1. We describe the various approaches adopted by the top 10 systems and their approaches.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

What Makes Sentences Semantically Related: A Textual Relatedness Dataset and Empirical Study

The degree of semantic relatedness of two units of language has long been considered fundamental to understanding meaning. Additionally, automatically determining relatedness has many applications such as question answering and summarization. However, prior NLP work has largely focused on semantic similarity, a subset of relatedness, because of a lack of relatedness datasets. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for Semantic Textual Relatedness, STR-2022, that has 5,500 English sentence pairs manually annotated using a comparative annotation framework, resulting in fine-grained scores. We show that human intuition regarding relatedness of sentence pairs is highly reliable, with a repeat annotation correlation of 0.84. We use the dataset to explore questions on what makes sentences semantically related. We also show the utility of STR-2022 for evaluating automatic methods of sentence representation and for various downstream NLP tasks. Our dataset, data statement, and annotation questionnaire can be found at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7599667

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Best Practices in the Creation and Use of Emotion Lexicons

Words play a central role in how we express ourselves. Lexicons of word-emotion associations are widely used in research and real-world applications for sentiment analysis, tracking emotions associated with products and policies, studying health disorders, tracking emotional arcs of stories, and so on. However, inappropriate and incorrect use of these lexicons can lead to not just sub-optimal results, but also inferences that are directly harmful to people. This paper brings together ideas from Affective Computing and AI Ethics to present, some of the practical and ethical considerations involved in the creation and use of emotion lexicons -- best practices. The goal is to provide a comprehensive set of relevant considerations, so that readers (especially those new to work with emotions) can find relevant information in one place. We hope this work will facilitate more thoughtfulness when one is deciding on what emotions to work on, how to create an emotion lexicon, how to use an emotion lexicon, how to draw meaningful inferences, and how to judge success.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

CS-Insights: A System for Analyzing Computer Science Research

This paper presents CS-Insights, an interactive web application to analyze computer science publications from DBLP through multiple perspectives. The dedicated interfaces allow its users to identify trends in research activity, productivity, accessibility, author's productivity, venues' statistics, topics of interest, and the impact of computer science research on other fields. CS-Insightsis publicly available, and its modular architecture can be easily adapted to domains other than computer science.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2022

D3: A Massive Dataset of Scholarly Metadata for Analyzing the State of Computer Science Research

DBLP is the largest open-access repository of scientific articles on computer science and provides metadata associated with publications, authors, and venues. We retrieved more than 6 million publications from DBLP and extracted pertinent metadata (e.g., abstracts, author affiliations, citations) from the publication texts to create the DBLP Discovery Dataset (D3). D3 can be used to identify trends in research activity, productivity, focus, bias, accessibility, and impact of computer science research. We present an initial analysis focused on the volume of computer science research (e.g., number of papers, authors, research activity), trends in topics of interest, and citation patterns. Our findings show that computer science is a growing research field (approx. 15% annually), with an active and collaborative researcher community. While papers in recent years present more bibliographical entries in comparison to previous decades, the average number of citations has been declining. Investigating papers' abstracts reveals that recent topic trends are clearly reflected in D3. Finally, we list further applications of D3 and pose supplemental research questions. The D3 dataset, our findings, and source code are publicly available for research purposes.

cs.DL↗
arXiv2022

Geographic Citation Gaps in NLP Research

In a fair world, people have equitable opportunities to education, to conduct scientific research, to publish, and to get credit for their work, regardless of where they live. However, it is common knowledge among researchers that a vast number of papers accepted at top NLP venues come from a handful of western countries and (lately) China; whereas, very few papers from Africa and South America get published. Similar disparities are also believed to exist for paper citation counts. In the spirit of "what we do not measure, we cannot improve", this work asks a series of questions on the relationship between geographical location and publication success (acceptance in top NLP venues and citation impact). We first created a dataset of 70,000 papers from the ACL Anthology, extracted their meta-information, and generated their citation network. We then show that not only are there substantial geographical disparities in paper acceptance and citation but also that these disparities persist even when controlling for a number of variables such as venue of publication and sub-field of NLP. Further, despite some steps taken by the NLP community to improve geographical diversity, we show that the disparity in publication metrics across locations is still on an increasing trend since the early 2000s. We release our code and dataset here: https://github.com/iamjanvijay/acl-cite-net

cs.CL↗
arXiv2022

Word Affect Intensities

Words often convey affect -- emotions, feelings, and attitudes. Further, different words can convey affect to various degrees (intensities). However, existing manually created lexicons for basic emotions (such as anger and fear) indicate only coarse categories of affect association (for example, associated with anger or not associated with anger). Automatic lexicons of affect provide fine degrees of association, but they tend not to be accurate as human-created lexicons. Here, for the first time, we present a manually created affect intensity lexicon with real-valued scores of intensity for four basic emotions: anger, fear, joy, and sadness. (We will subsequently add entries for more emotions such as disgust, anticipation, trust, and surprise.) We refer to this dataset as the NRC Affect Intensity Lexicon, or AIL for short. AIL has entries for close to 6,000 English words. We used a technique called best-worst scaling (BWS) to create the lexicon. BWS improves annotation consistency and obtains reliable fine-grained scores (split-half reliability > 0.91). We also compare the entries in AIL with the entries in the NRC VAD Lexicon, which has valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) scores for 20K English words. We find that anger, fear, and sadness words, on average, have very similar VAD scores. However, sadness words tend to have slightly lower dominance scores than fear and anger words. The Affect Intensity Lexicon has applications in automatic emotion analysis in a number of domains such as commerce, education, intelligence, and public health. AIL is also useful in the building of natural language generation systems.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2022

Frustratingly Easy Sentiment Analysis of Text Streams: Generating High-Quality Emotion Arcs Using Emotion Lexicons

Automatically generated emotion arcs -- that capture how an individual or a population feels over time -- are widely used in industry and research. However, there is little work on evaluating the generated arcs. This is in part due to the difficulty of establishing the true (gold) emotion arc. Our work, for the first time, systematically and quantitatively evaluates automatically generated emotion arcs. We also compare two common ways of generating emotion arcs: Machine-Learning (ML) models and Lexicon-Only (LexO) methods. Using a number of diverse datasets, we systematically study the relationship between the quality of an emotion lexicon and the quality of the emotion arc that can be generated with it. We also study the relationship between the quality of an instance-level emotion detection system (say from an ML model) and the quality of emotion arcs that can be generated with it. We show that despite being markedly poor at instance level, LexO methods are highly accurate at generating emotion arcs by aggregating information from hundreds of instances. This has wide-spread implications for commercial development, as well as research in psychology, public health, digital humanities, etc. that values simple interpretable methods and disprefers the need for domain-specific training data, programming expertise, and high-carbon-footprint models.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2022

Tweet Emotion Dynamics: Emotion Word Usage in Tweets from US and Canada

Over the last decade, Twitter has emerged as one of the most influential forums for social, political, and health discourse. In this paper, we introduce a massive dataset of more than 45 million geo-located tweets posted between 2015 and 2021 from US and Canada (TUSC), especially curated for natural language analysis. We also introduce Tweet Emotion Dynamics (TED) -- metrics to capture patterns of emotions associated with tweets over time. We use TED and TUSC to explore the use of emotion-associated words across US and Canada; across 2019 (pre-pandemic), 2020 (the year the pandemic hit), and 2021 (the second year of the pandemic); and across individual tweeters. We show that Canadian tweets tend to have higher valence, lower arousal, and higher dominance than the US tweets. Further, we show that the COVID-19 pandemic had a marked impact on the emotional signature of tweets posted in 2020, when compared to the adjoining years. Finally, we determine metrics of TED for 170,000 tweeters to benchmark characteristics of TED metrics at an aggregate level. TUSC and the metrics for TED will enable a wide variety of research on studying how we use language to express ourselves, persuade, communicate, and influence, with particularly promising applications in public health, affective science, social science, and psychology.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2022

Ethics Sheet for Automatic Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis

The importance and pervasiveness of emotions in our lives makes affective computing a tremendously important and vibrant line of work. Systems for automatic emotion recognition (AER) and sentiment analysis can be facilitators of enormous progress (e.g., in improving public health and commerce) but also enablers of great harm (e.g., for suppressing dissidents and manipulating voters). Thus, it is imperative that the affective computing community actively engage with the ethical ramifications of their creations. In this paper, I have synthesized and organized information from AI Ethics and Emotion Recognition literature to present fifty ethical considerations relevant to AER. Notably, the sheet fleshes out assumptions hidden in how AER is commonly framed, and in the choices often made regarding the data, method, and evaluation. Special attention is paid to the implications of AER on privacy and social groups. Along the way, key recommendations are made for responsible AER. The objective of the sheet is to facilitate and encourage more thoughtfulness on why to automate, how to automate, and how to judge success well before the building of AER systems. Additionally, the sheet acts as a useful introductory document on emotion recognition (complementing survey articles).

cs.CL↗
arXiv2022

Ethics Sheets for AI Tasks

Several high-profile events, such as the mass testing of emotion recognition systems on vulnerable sub-populations and using question answering systems to make moral judgments, have highlighted how technology will often lead to more adverse outcomes for those that are already marginalized. At issue here are not just individual systems and datasets, but also the AI tasks themselves. In this position paper, I make a case for thinking about ethical considerations not just at the level of individual models and datasets, but also at the level of AI tasks. I will present a new form of such an effort, Ethics Sheets for AI Tasks, dedicated to fleshing out the assumptions and ethical considerations hidden in how a task is commonly framed and in the choices we make regarding the data, method, and evaluation. I will also present a template for ethics sheets with 50 ethical considerations, using the task of emotion recognition as a running example. Ethics sheets are a mechanism to engage with and document ethical considerations before building datasets and systems. Similar to survey articles, a small number of ethics sheets can serve numerous researchers and developers.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2022

Ruddit: Norms of Offensiveness for English Reddit Comments

On social media platforms, hateful and offensive language negatively impact the mental well-being of users and the participation of people from diverse backgrounds. Automatic methods to detect offensive language have largely relied on datasets with categorical labels. However, comments can vary in their degree of offensiveness. We create the first dataset of English language Reddit comments that has fine-grained, real-valued scores between -1 (maximally supportive) and 1 (maximally offensive). The dataset was annotated using Best--Worst Scaling, a form of comparative annotation that has been shown to alleviate known biases of using rating scales. We show that the method produces highly reliable offensiveness scores. Finally, we evaluate the ability of widely-used neural models to predict offensiveness scores on this new dataset.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2021

Emotion Dynamics in Movie Dialogues

Emotion dynamics is a framework for measuring how an individual's emotions change over time. It is a powerful tool for understanding how we behave and interact with the world. In this paper, we introduce a framework to track emotion dynamics through one's utterances. Specifically we introduce a number of utterance emotion dynamics (UED) metrics inspired by work in Psychology. We use this approach to trace emotional arcs of movie characters. We analyze thousands of such character arcs to test hypotheses that inform our broader understanding of stories. Notably, we show that there is a tendency for characters to use increasingly more negative words and become increasingly emotionally discordant with each other until about 90 percent of the narrative length. UED also has applications in behavior studies, social sciences, and public health.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2021

Sentiment Analysis: Automatically Detecting Valence, Emotions, and Other Affectual States from Text

Recent advances in machine learning have led to computer systems that are human-like in behaviour. Sentiment analysis, the automatic determination of emotions in text, is allowing us to capitalize on substantial previously unattainable opportunities in commerce, public health, government policy, social sciences, and art. Further, analysis of emotions in text, from news to social media posts, is improving our understanding of not just how people convey emotions through language but also how emotions shape our behaviour. This article presents a sweeping overview of sentiment analysis research that includes: the origins of the field, the rich landscape of tasks, challenges, a survey of the methods and resources used, and applications. We also discuss discuss how, without careful fore-thought, sentiment analysis has the potential for harmful outcomes. We outline the latest lines of research in pursuit of fairness in sentiment analysis.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2020

Gender Gap in Natural Language Processing Research: Disparities in Authorship and Citations

Disparities in authorship and citations across gender can have substantial adverse consequences not just on the disadvantaged genders, but also on the field of study as a whole. Measuring gender gaps is a crucial step towards addressing them. In this work, we examine female first author percentages and the citations to their papers in Natural Language Processing (1965 to 2019). We determine aggregate-level statistics using an existing manually curated author--gender list as well as first names strongly associated with a gender. We find that only about 29% of first authors are female and only about 25% of last authors are female. Notably, this percentage has not improved since the mid 2000s. We also show that, on average, female first authors are cited less than male first authors, even when controlling for experience and area of research. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations involved in automatic demographic analysis.

cs.DL↗
arXiv2020

SOLO: A Corpus of Tweets for Examining the State of Being Alone

The state of being alone can have a substantial impact on our lives, though experiences with time alone diverge significantly among individuals. Psychologists distinguish between the concept of solitude, a positive state of voluntary aloneness, and the concept of loneliness, a negative state of dissatisfaction with the quality of one's social interactions. Here, for the first time, we conduct a large-scale computational analysis to explore how the terms associated with the state of being alone are used in online language. We present SOLO (State of Being Alone), a corpus of over 4 million tweets collected with query terms 'solitude', 'lonely', and 'loneliness'. We use SOLO to analyze the language and emotions associated with the state of being alone. We show that the term 'solitude' tends to co-occur with more positive, high-dominance words (e.g., enjoy, bliss) while the terms 'lonely' and 'loneliness' frequently co-occur with negative, low-dominance words (e.g., scared, depressed), which confirms the conceptual distinctions made in psychology. We also show that women are more likely to report on negative feelings of being lonely as compared to men, and there are more teenagers among the tweeters that use the word 'lonely' than among the tweeters that use the word 'solitude'.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2020

NLP Scholar: An Interactive Visual Explorer for Natural Language Processing Literature

As part of the NLP Scholar project, we created a single unified dataset of NLP papers and their meta-information (including citation numbers), by extracting and aligning information from the ACL Anthology and Google Scholar. In this paper, we describe several interconnected interactive visualizations (dashboards) that present various aspects of the data. Clicking on an item within a visualization or entering query terms in the search boxes filters the data in all visualizations in the dashboard. This allows users to search for papers in the area of their interest, published within specific time periods, published by specified authors, etc. The interactive visualizations presented here, and the associated dataset of papers mapped to citations, have additional uses as well including understanding how the field is growing (both overall and across sub-areas), as well as quantifying the impact of different types of papers on subsequent publications.

cs.DL↗