On the Distribution of Lexical Features at Multiple Levels of Analysis

Fatemeh Almodaresi, Lyle Ungar, Vivek Kulkarni, Mohsen Zakeri, Salvatore Giorgi, H. Andrew Schwartz


Abstract
Natural language processing has increasingly moved from modeling documents and words toward studying the people behind the language. This move to working with data at the user or community level has presented the field with different characteristics of linguistic data. In this paper, we empirically characterize various lexical distributions at different levels of analysis, showing that, while most features are decidedly sparse and non-normal at the message-level (as with traditional NLP), they follow the central limit theorem to become much more Log-normal or even Normal at the user- and county-levels. Finally, we demonstrate that modeling lexical features for the correct level of analysis leads to marked improvements in common social scientific prediction tasks.
Anthology ID:
P17-2013
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
79–84
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-2013
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-2013
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fatemeh Almodaresi, Lyle Ungar, Vivek Kulkarni, Mohsen Zakeri, Salvatore Giorgi, and H. Andrew Schwartz. 2017. On the Distribution of Lexical Features at Multiple Levels of Analysis. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 79–84, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the Distribution of Lexical Features at Multiple Levels of Analysis (Almodaresi et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-2013.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P17-2013.mp4