Stylistic Variation in Social Media Part-of-Speech Tagging

Murali Raghu Babu Balusu, Taha Merghani, Jacob Eisenstein


Abstract
Social media features substantial stylistic variation, raising new challenges for syntactic analysis of online writing. However, this variation is often aligned with author attributes such as age, gender, and geography, as well as more readily-available social network metadata. In this paper, we report new evidence on the link between language and social networks in the task of part-of-speech tagging. We find that tagger error rates are correlated with network structure, with high accuracy in some parts of the network, and lower accuracy elsewhere. As a result, tagger accuracy depends on training from a balanced sample of the network, rather than training on texts from a narrow subcommunity. We also describe our attempts to add robustness to stylistic variation, by building a mixture-of-experts model in which each expert is associated with a region of the social network. While prior work found that similar approaches yield performance improvements in sentiment analysis and entity linking, we were unable to obtain performance improvements in part-of-speech tagging, despite strong evidence for the link between part-of-speech error rates and social network structure.
Anthology ID:
W18-1602
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Stylistic Variation
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans
Editors:
Julian Brooke, Lucie Flekova, Moshe Koppel, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
Style-Var
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11–19
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-1602
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-1602
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Murali Raghu Babu Balusu, Taha Merghani, and Jacob Eisenstein. 2018. Stylistic Variation in Social Media Part-of-Speech Tagging. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Stylistic Variation, pages 11–19, New Orleans. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stylistic Variation in Social Media Part-of-Speech Tagging (Balusu et al., Style-Var 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-1602.pdf
Data
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