Variationist: Exploring Multifaceted Variation and Bias in Written Language Data

Alan Ramponi, Camilla Casula, Stefano Menini


Abstract
Exploring and understanding language data is a fundamental stage in all areas dealing with human language. It allows NLP practitioners to uncover quality concerns and harmful biases in data before training, and helps linguists and social scientists to gain insight into language use and human behavior. Yet, there is currently a lack of a unified, customizable tool to seamlessly inspect and visualize language variation and bias across multiple variables, language units, and diverse metrics that go beyond descriptive statistics. In this paper, we introduce Variationist, a highly-modular, extensible, and task-agnostic tool that fills this gap. Variationist handles at once a potentially unlimited combination of variable types and semantics across diversity and association metrics with regards to the language unit of choice, and orchestrates the creation of up to five-dimensional interactive charts for over 30 variable type-semantics combinations. Through our case studies on computational dialectology, human label variation, and text generation, we show how Variationist enables researchers from different disciplines to effortlessly answer specific research questions or unveil undesired associations in language data. A Python library, code, documentation, and tutorials are made publicly available to the research community.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-demos.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Yixin Cao, Yang Feng, Deyi Xiong
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
346–354
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-demos.33
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-demos.33
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alan Ramponi, Camilla Casula, and Stefano Menini. 2024. Variationist: Exploring Multifaceted Variation and Bias in Written Language Data. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations), pages 346–354, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Variationist: Exploring Multifaceted Variation and Bias in Written Language Data (Ramponi et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-demos.33.pdf