Many tasks in text-based computational social science (CSS) involve the classification of political statements into categories based on a domain-specific codebook. In order to be useful for CSS analysis, these categories must be fine-grained. The typically skewed distribution of fine-grained categories, however, results in a challenging classification problem on the NLP side. This paper proposes to make use of the hierarchical relations among categories typically present in such codebooks:e.g., markets and taxation are both subcategories of economy, while borders is a subcategory of security. We use these ontological relations as prior knowledge to establish additional constraints on the learned model, thusimproving performance overall and in particular for infrequent categories. We evaluate several lightweight variants of this intuition by extending state-of-the-art transformer-based textclassifiers on two datasets and multiple languages. We find the most consistent improvement for an approach based on regularization.

In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness that many NLP systems incorporate biases of various types (e.g., regarding gender or race) which can have significant negative consequences. At the same time, the techniques used to statistically analyze such biases are still relatively simple. Typically, studies test for the presence of a significant difference between two levels of a single bias variable (e.g., male vs. female) without attention to potential confounders, and do not quantify the importance of the bias variable. This article proposes to analyze bias in the output of NLP systems using multivariate regression models. They provide a robust and more informative alternative which (a) generalizes to multiple bias variables, (b) can take covariates into account, (c) can be combined with measures of effect size to quantify the size of bias. Jointly, these effects contribute to a more robust statistical analysis of bias that can be used to diagnose system behavior and extract informative examples. We demonstrate the benefits of our method by analyzing a range of current NLP models on one regression and one classification tasks (emotion intensity prediction and coreference resolution, respectively).

The analysis of public debates crucially requires the classification of political demands according to hierarchical claim ontologies (e.g. for immigration, a supercategory “Controlling Migration” might have subcategories “Asylum limit” or “Border installations”). A major challenge for automatic claim classification is the large number and low frequency of such subclasses. We address it by jointly predicting pairs of matching super- and subcategories. We operationalize this idea by (a) encoding soft constraints in the claim classifier and (b) imposing hard constraints via Integer Linear Programming. Our experiments with different claim classifiers on a German immigration newspaper corpus show consistent performance increases for joint prediction, in particular for infrequent categories and discuss the complementarity of the two approaches.

Text classification is a central tool in NLP. However, when the target classes are strongly correlated with other textual attributes, text classification models can pick up “wrong” features, leading to bad generalization and biases. In social media analysis, this problem surfaces for demographic user classes such as language, topic, or gender, which influence the generate text to a substantial extent. Adversarial training has been claimed to mitigate this problem, but thorough evaluation is missing. In this paper, we experiment with text classification of the correlated attributes of document topic and author gender, using a novel multilingual parallel corpus of TED talk transcripts. Our findings are: (a) individual classifiers for topic and author gender are indeed biased; (b) debiasing with adversarial training works for topic, but breaks down for author gender; (c) gender debiasing results differ across languages. We interpret the result in terms of feature space overlap, highlighting the role of linguistic surface realization of the target classes.

DEbateNet-migr15 is a manually annotated dataset for German which covers the public debate on immigration in 2015. The building block of our annotation is the political science notion of a claim, i.e., a statement made by a political actor (a politician, a party, or a group of citizens) that a specific action should be taken (e.g., vacant flats should be assigned to refugees). We identify claims in newspaper articles, assign them to actors and fine-grained categories and annotate their polarity and date. The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, we release the full DEbateNet-mig15 corpus and document it by means of a quantitative and qualitative analysis; second, we demonstrate its application in a discourse network analysis framework, which enables us to capture the temporal dynamics of the political debate

Manifestos are official documents of political parties, providing a comprehensive topical overview of the electoral programs. Voters, however, seldom read them and often prefer other channels, such as newspaper articles, to understand the party positions on various policy issues. The natural question to ask is how compatible these two formats (manifesto and newspaper reports) are in their representation of party positioning. We address this question with an approach that combines political science (manual annotation and analysis) and natural language processing (supervised claim identification) in a cross-text type setting: we train a classifier on annotated newspaper data and test its performance on manifestos. Our findings show a) strong performance for supervised classification even across text types and b) a substantive overlap between the two formats in terms of party positioning, with differences regarding the salience of specific issues.

A central concern in Computational Social Sciences (CSS) is fairness: where the role of NLP is to scale up text analysis to large corpora, the quality of automatic analyses should be as independent as possible of textual properties. We analyze the performance of a state-of-the-art neural model on the task of political claims detection (i.e., the identification of forward-looking statements made by political actors) and identify a strong frequency bias: claims made by frequent actors are recognized better. We propose two simple debiasing methods which mask proper names and pronouns during training of the model, thus removing personal information bias. We find that (a) these methods significantly decrease frequency bias while keeping the overall performance stable; and (b) the resulting models improve when evaluated in an out-of-domain setting.

Understanding the structures of political debates (which actors make what claims) is essential for understanding democratic political decision making. The vision of computational construction of such discourse networks from newspaper reports brings together political science and natural language processing. This paper presents three contributions towards this goal: (a) a requirements analysis, linking the task to knowledge base population; (b) an annotated pilot corpus of migration claims based on German newspaper reports; (c) initial modeling results.

This paper describes our system for SemEval-2019 Task 4: Hyperpartisan News Detection (Kiesel et al., 2019). We use pretrained BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) architecture and investigate the effect of different fine tuning regimes on the final classification task. We show that additional pretraining on news domain improves the performance on the Hyperpartisan News Detection task. Our system ranked 8th out of 42 teams with 78.3% accuracy on the held-out test dataset.

We introduce Morse, a recurrent encoder-decoder model that produces morphological analyses of each word in a sentence. The encoder turns the relevant information about the word and its context into a fixed size vector representation and the decoder generates the sequence of characters for the lemma followed by a sequence of individual morphological features. We show that generating morphological features individually rather than as a combined tag allows the model to handle rare or unseen tags and to outperform whole-tag models. In addition, generating morphological features as a sequence rather than, for example, an unordered set allows our model to produce an arbitrary number of features that represent multiple inflectional groups in morphologically complex languages. We obtain state-of-the-art results in nine languages of different morphological complexity under low-resource, high-resource, and transfer learning settings. We also introduce TrMor2018, a new high-accuracy Turkish morphology data set. Our Morse implementation and the TrMor2018 data set are available online to support future research.1See https://github.com/ai-ku/Morse.jl for a Morse implementation in Julia/Knet (Yuret, 2016) and https://github.com/ai-ku/TrMor2018 for the new Turkish data set.

We introduce tree-stack LSTM to model state of a transition based parser with recurrent neural networks. Tree-stack LSTM does not use any parse tree based or hand-crafted features, yet performs better than models with these features. We also develop new set of embeddings from raw features to enhance the performance. There are 4 main components of this model: stack’s σ-LSTM, buffer’s β-LSTM, actions’ LSTM and tree-RNN. All LSTMs use continuous dense feature vectors (embeddings) as an input. Tree-RNN updates these embeddings based on transitions. We show that our model improves performance with low resource languages compared with its predecessors. We participate in CoNLL 2018 UD Shared Task as the “KParse” team and ranked 16th in LAS, 15th in BLAS and BLEX metrics, of 27 participants parsing 82 test sets from 57 languages.