Pretrained language models (PLMs) on domain-specific data have been proven to be effective for in-domain natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Our work aimed to develop a language model which can be effective for the NLP tasks with the data from diverse social media platforms. We pretrained a language model on Twitter and Reddit posts in English consisting of 929M sequence blocks for 112K steps. We benchmarked our model and 3 transformer-based models—BERT, BERTweet, and RoBERTa on 40 social media text classification tasks. The results showed that although our model did not perform the best on all of the tasks, it outperformed the baseline model—BERT on most of the tasks, which illustrates the effectiveness of our model. Also, our work provides some insights of how to improve the efficiency of training PLMs.

For the past seven years, the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) shared tasks have promoted the community-driven development and evaluation of advanced natural language processing systems to detect, extract, and normalize health-related information in public, user-generated content. This seventh iteration consists of ten tasks that include English and Spanish posts on Twitter, Reddit, and WebMD. Interest in the #SMM4H shared tasks continues to grow, with 117 teams that registered and 54 teams that participated in at least one task—a 17.5% and 35% increase in registration and participation, respectively, over the last iteration. This paper provides an overview of the tasks and participants’ systems. The data sets remain available upon request, and new systems can be evaluated through the post-evaluation phase on CodaLab.

This paper describes our approach for six classification tasks (Tasks 1a, 3a, 3b, 4 and 5) and one span detection task (Task 1b) from the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2021 shared tasks. We developed two separate systems for classification and span detection, both based on pre-trained Transformer-based models. In addition, we applied oversampling and classifier ensembling in the classification tasks. The results of our submissions are over the median scores in all tasks except for Task 1a. Furthermore, our model achieved first place in Task 4 and obtained a 7% higher F1-score than the median in Task 1b.

We present a novel deep learning-based framework to generate embedding representations of fine-grained emotions that can be used to computationally describe psychological models of emotions. Our framework integrates a contextualized embedding encoder with a multi-head probing model that enables to interpret dynamically learned representations optimized for an emotion classification task. Our model is evaluated on the Empathetic Dialogue dataset and shows the state-of-the-art result for classifying 32 emotions. Our layer analysis can derive an emotion graph to depict hierarchical relations among the emotions. Our emotion representations can be used to generate an emotion wheel directly comparable to the one from Plutchik’s model, and also augment the values of missing emotions in the PAD emotional state model.

This paper describes our approach for the automatic grading of evidence task from the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) Shared Task 2021. We developed two classification models with SVM and RoBERTa and applied an ensemble technique to combine the grades from different classifiers. Our results showed that the SVM model achieved comparable results to the RoBERTa model, and the ensemble system outperformed the individual models on this task. Our system achieved the first place among five teams and obtained 3.3% higher accuracy than the second place.

This paper describes the system developed by the Emory team for the WNUT-2020 Task 2: “Identifi- cation of Informative COVID-19 English Tweet”. Our system explores three recent Transformer- based deep learning models pretrained on large- scale data to encode documents. Moreover, we developed two feature enrichment methods to en- hance document embeddings by integrating emoji embeddings and syntactic features into deep learn- ing models. Our system achieved F1-score of 0.897 and accuracy of 90.1% on the test set, and ranked in the top-third of all 55 teams.

Free text data from social media is now widely used in natural language processing research, and one of the most common machine learning tasks performed on this data is classification. Generally speaking, performances of supervised classification algorithms on social media datasets are lower than those on texts from other sources, but recently-proposed transformer-based models have considerably improved upon legacy state-of-the-art systems. Currently, there is no study that compares the performances of different variants of transformer-based models on a wide range of social media text classification datasets. In this paper, we benchmark the performances of transformer-based pre-trained models on 25 social media text classification datasets, 6 of which are health-related. We compare three pre-trained language models, RoBERTa-base, BERTweet and ClinicalBioBERT in terms of classification accuracy. Our experiments show that RoBERTa-base and BERTweet perform comparably on most datasets, and considerably better than ClinicalBioBERT, even on health-related datasets.