Deconfounded Lexicon Induction for Interpretable Social Science

Reid Pryzant, Kelly Shen, Dan Jurafsky, Stefan Wagner


Abstract
NLP algorithms are increasingly used in computational social science to take linguistic observations and predict outcomes like human preferences or actions. Making these social models transparent and interpretable often requires identifying features in the input that predict outcomes while also controlling for potential confounds. We formalize this need as a new task: inducing a lexicon that is predictive of a set of target variables yet uncorrelated to a set of confounding variables. We introduce two deep learning algorithms for the task. The first uses a bifurcated architecture to separate the explanatory power of the text and confounds. The second uses an adversarial discriminator to force confound-invariant text encodings. Both elicit lexicons from learned weights and attentional scores. We use them to induce lexicons that are predictive of timely responses to consumer complaints (controlling for product), enrollment from course descriptions (controlling for subject), and sales from product descriptions (controlling for seller). In each domain our algorithms pick words that are associated with narrative persuasion; more predictive and less confound-related than those of standard feature weighting and lexicon induction techniques like regression and log odds.
Anthology ID:
N18-1146
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1615–1625
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1146
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1146
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Reid Pryzant, Kelly Shen, Dan Jurafsky, and Stefan Wagner. 2018. Deconfounded Lexicon Induction for Interpretable Social Science. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1615–1625, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Deconfounded Lexicon Induction for Interpretable Social Science (Pryzant et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1146.pdf