Enhancing Data Quality through Simple De-duplication: Navigating Responsible Computational Social Science Research

Yida Mu, Mali Jin, Xingyi Song, Nikolaos Aletras


Abstract
Research in natural language processing (NLP) for Computational Social Science (CSS) heavily relies on data from social media platforms. This data plays a crucial role in the development of models for analysing socio-linguistic phenomena within online communities. In this work, we conduct an in-depth examination of 20 datasets extensively used in NLP for CSS to comprehensively examine data quality. Our analysis reveals that social media datasets exhibit varying levels of data duplication. Consequently, this gives rise to challenges like label inconsistencies and data leakage, compromising the reliability of models. Our findings also suggest that data duplication has an impact on the current claims of state-of-the-art performance, potentially leading to an overestimation of model effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Finally, we propose new protocols and best practices for improving dataset development from social media data and its usage.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.694
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12477–12492
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.694
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yida Mu, Mali Jin, Xingyi Song, and Nikolaos Aletras. 2024. Enhancing Data Quality through Simple De-duplication: Navigating Responsible Computational Social Science Research. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12477–12492, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Data Quality through Simple De-duplication: Navigating Responsible Computational Social Science Research (Mu et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.694.pdf