On Text-based Personality Computing: Challenges and Future Directions

Text-based personality computing (TPC) has gained many research interests in NLP. In this paper, we describe 15 challenges that we consider deserving the attention of the research community. These challenges are organized by the following topics: personality taxonomies, measurement quality, datasets, performance evaluation, modelling choices, as well as ethics and fairness. When addressing each challenge, not only do we combine perspectives from both NLP and social sciences, but also offer concrete suggestions towards more valid and reliable TPC research.

Modelling Stance Detection as Textual Entailment Recognition and Leveraging Measurement Knowledge from Social Sciences

Stance detection (SD) can be considered a special case of textual entailment recognition (TER), a generic natural language task. Modelling SD as TER may offer benefits like more training data and a more general learning scheme. In this paper, we present an initial empirical analysis of this approach. We apply it to a difficult but relevant test case where no existing labelled SD dataset is available, because this is where modelling SD as TER may be especially helpful. We also leverage measurement knowledge from social sciences to improve model performance. We discuss our findings and suggest future research directions.

Neural Networks for Latent Budget Analysis of Compositional Data

Compositional data are non-negative data collected in a rectangular matrix with a constant row sum. Due to the non-negativity the focus is on conditional proportions that add up to 1 for each row. A row of conditional proportions is called an observed budget. Latent budget analysis (LBA) assumes a mixture of latent budgets that explains the observed budgets. LBA is usually fitted to a contingency table, where the rows are levels of one or more explanatory variables and the columns the levels of a response variable. In prospective studies, there is only knowledge about the explanatory variables of individuals and interest goes out to predicting the response variable. Thus, a form of LBA is needed that has the functionality of prediction. Previous studies proposed a constrained neural network (NN) extension of LBA that was hampered by an unsatisfying prediction ability. Here we propose LBA-NN, a feed forward NN model that yields a similar interpretation to LBA but equips LBA with a better ability of prediction. A stable and plausible interpretation of LBA-NN is obtained through the use of importance plots and table, that show the relative importance of all explanatory variables on the response variable. An LBA-NN-K- means approach that applies K-means clustering on the importance table is used to produce K clusters that are comparable to K latent budgets in LBA. Here we provide different experiments where LBA-NN is implemented and compared with LBA. In our analysis, LBA-NN outperforms LBA in prediction in terms of accuracy, specificity, recall and mean square error. We provide open-source software at GitHub.

Multimodal Learning for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction using EHR Data

Electronic health records (EHRs) contain structured and unstructured data of significant clinical and research value. Various machine learning approaches have been developed to employ information in EHRs for risk prediction. The majority of these attempts, however, focus on structured EHR fields and lose the vast amount of information in the unstructured texts. To exploit the potential information captured in EHRs, in this study we propose a multimodal recurrent neural network model for cardiovascular risk prediction that integrates both medical texts and structured clinical information. The proposed multimodal bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) model concatenates word embeddings to classical clinical predictors before applying them to a final fully connected neural network. In the experiments, we compare performance of different deep neural network (DNN) architectures including convolutional neural network and long short-term memory in scenarios of using clinical variables and chest X-ray radiology reports. Evaluated on a data set of real world patients with manifest vascular disease or at high-risk for cardiovascular disease, the proposed BiLSTM model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance and outperforms other DNN baseline architectures.

Fair inference on error-prone outcomes

Fair inference in supervised learning is an important and active area of research, yielding a range of useful methods to assess and account for fairness criteria when predicting ground truth targets. As shown in recent work, however, when target labels are error-prone, potential prediction unfairness can arise from measurement error. In this paper, we show that, when an error-prone proxy target is used, existing methods to assess and calibrate fairness criteria do not extend to the true target variable of interest. To remedy this problem, we suggest a framework resulting from the combination of two existing literatures: fair ML methods, such as those found in the counterfactual fairness literature on the one hand, and, on the other, measurement models found in the statistical literature. We discuss these approaches and their connection resulting in our framework. In a healthcare decision problem, we find that using a latent variable model to account for measurement error removes the unfairness detected previously.

Persian Sentiment Analyzer: A Framework based on a Novel Feature Selection Method

In the recent decade, with the enormous growth of digital content in internet and databases, sentiment analysis has received more and more attention between information retrieval and natural language processing researchers. Sentiment analysis aims to use automated tools to detect subjective information from reviews. One of the main challenges in sentiment analysis is feature selection. Feature selection is widely used as the first stage of analysis and classification tasks to reduce the dimension of problem, and improve speed by the elimination of irrelevant and redundant features. Up to now as there are few researches conducted on feature selection in sentiment analysis, there are very rare works for Persian sentiment analysis. This paper considers the problem of sentiment classification using different feature selection methods for online customer reviews in Persian language. Three of the challenges of Persian text are using of a wide variety of declensional suffixes, different word spacing and many informal or colloquial words. In this paper we study these challenges by proposing a model for sentiment classification of Persian review documents. The proposed model is based on lemmatization and feature selection and is employed Naive Bayes algorithm for classification. We evaluate the performance of the model on a manually gathered collection of cellphone reviews, where the results show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.