User Factor Adaptation for User Embedding via Multitask Learning

Xiaolei Huang, Michael J. Paul, Franck Dernoncourt, Robin Burke, Mark Dredze


Abstract
Language varies across users and their interested fields in social media data: words authored by a user across his/her interests may have different meanings (e.g., cool) or sentiments (e.g., fast). However, most of the existing methods to train user embeddings ignore the variations across user interests, such as product and movie categories (e.g., drama vs. action). In this study, we treat the user interest as domains and empirically examine how the user language can vary across the user factor in three English social media datasets. We then propose a user embedding model to account for the language variability of user interests via a multitask learning framework. The model learns user language and its variations without human supervision. While existing work mainly evaluated the user embedding by extrinsic tasks, we propose an intrinsic evaluation via clustering and evaluate user embeddings by an extrinsic task, text classification. The experiments on the three English-language social media datasets show that our proposed approach can generally outperform baselines via adapting the user factor.
Anthology ID:
2021.adaptnlp-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Domain Adaptation for NLP
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Kyiv, Ukraine
Editors:
Eyal Ben-David, Shay Cohen, Ryan McDonald, Barbara Plank, Roi Reichart, Guy Rotman, Yftah Ziser
Venue:
AdaptNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
172–182
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.adaptnlp-1.18
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaolei Huang, Michael J. Paul, Franck Dernoncourt, Robin Burke, and Mark Dredze. 2021. User Factor Adaptation for User Embedding via Multitask Learning. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Domain Adaptation for NLP, pages 172–182, Kyiv, Ukraine. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
User Factor Adaptation for User Embedding via Multitask Learning (Huang et al., AdaptNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.adaptnlp-1.18.pdf
Code
 xiaoleihuang/UserEmbedding