Hang Chen


2023

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How to Enhance Causal Discrimination of Utterances: A Case on Affective Reasoning
Hang Chen | Xinyu Yang | Jing Luo | Wenjing Zhu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Our investigation into the Affective Reasoning in Conversation (ARC) task highlights the challenge of causal discrimination. Almost all existing models, including large language models (LLMs), excel at capturing semantic correlations within utterance embeddings but fall short in determining the specific causal relationships. To overcome this limitation, we propose the incorporation of i.i.d. noise terms into the conversation process, thereby constructing a structural causal model (SCM). It explores how distinct causal relationships of fitted embeddings can be discerned through independent conditions. To facilitate the implementation of deep learning, we introduce the cogn frameworks to handle unstructured conversation data, and employ an autoencoder architecture to regard the unobservable noise as learnable “implicit causes.” Moreover, we curate a synthetic dataset that includes i.i.d. noise. Through comprehensive experiments, we validate the effectiveness and interpretability of our approach. Our code is available in https://github.com/Zodiark-ch/mater-of-our-EMNLP2023-paper.

2019

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What does the language of foods say about us?
Hoang Van | Ahmad Musa | Hang Chen | Stephen Kobourov | Mihai Surdeanu
Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI 2019)

In this work we investigate the signal contained in the language of food on social media. We experiment with a dataset of 24 million food-related tweets, and make several observations. First,thelanguageoffoodhaspredictive power. We are able to predict if states in the United States (US) are above the medianratesfortype2diabetesmellitus(T2DM), income, poverty, and education – outperforming previous work by 4–18%. Second, we investigate the effect of socioeconomic factors (income, poverty, and education) on predicting state-level T2DM rates. Socioeconomic factors do improve T2DM prediction, with the greatestimprovementcomingfrompovertyinformation(6%),but,importantly,thelanguage of food adds distinct information that is not captured by socioeconomics. Third, we analyze how the language of food has changed over a five-year period (2013 – 2017), which is indicative of the shift in eating habits in the US during that period. We find several food trends, and that the language of food is used differently by different groups such as differentgenders. Last,weprovideanonlinevisualization tool for real-time queries and semantic analysis.