Sam Davidson

Incivility is not only prevalent on online social media platforms, but also has concrete effects on individual users, online groups, and the platforms themselves. Given the prevalence and effects of online incivility, and the challenges involved in human-based incivility detection, it is urgent to develop validated and versatile automatic approaches to identifying uncivil posts and comments. This project advances both a neural, BERT-based classifier as well as a logistic regression classifier… Show more

Incivility is not only prevalent on online social media platforms, but also has concrete effects on individual users, online groups, and the platforms themselves. Given the prevalence and effects of online incivility, and the challenges involved in human-based incivility detection, it is urgent to develop validated and versatile automatic approaches to identifying uncivil posts and comments. This project advances both a neural, BERT-based classifier as well as a logistic regression classifier to identify uncivil comments. The classifier is trained on a dataset of Reddit posts, which are annotated for incivility, and further expanded using a combination of labeled data from Reddit and Twitter. Our best performing model achieves an F1 of 0.802 on our Reddit test set. The final model is not only applicable across social media platforms and their distinct data structures, but also computationally versatile, and-as such-ready to be used on vast volumes of online data. All trained models and annotated data are made available to the research community. Show less

The development of effective NLP tools for the L2 classroom depends largely on the availability of large annotated corpora of language learner text. While annotated learner corpora of English are widely available, large learner corpora of Spanish are less common. Those Spanish corpora that are available do not contain the annotations needed to facilitate the development of tools beneficial to language learners, such as grammatical error correction. As a result, the field has seen little… Show more

The development of effective NLP tools for the L2 classroom depends largely on the availability of large annotated corpora of language learner text. While annotated learner corpora of English are widely available, large learner corpora of Spanish are less common. Those Spanish corpora that are available do not contain the annotations needed to facilitate the development of tools beneficial to language learners, such as grammatical error correction. As a result, the field has seen little research in NLP tools designed to benefit Spanish language learners and teachers. We introduce COWS-L2H, a freely available corpus of Spanish learner data which includes error annotations and parallel corrected text to help researchers better understand L2 development, to examine teaching practices empirically, and to develop NLP tools to better serve the Spanish teaching community. We demonstrate the utility of this corpus by developing a neural-network based grammatical error correction system for Spanish learner writing. Show less

Dependency parsing of conversational input can play an important role in language understanding for dialog systems by identifying the relationships between entities extracted from user utterances. Additionally, effective dependency parsing can elucidate differences in language structure and usage for discourse analysis of human-human versus human-machine dialogs. However, models trained on datasets based on news articles and web data do not perform well on spoken human-machine dialog, and… Show more

Dependency parsing of conversational input can play an important role in language understanding for dialog systems by identifying the relationships between entities extracted from user utterances. Additionally, effective dependency parsing can elucidate differences in language structure and usage for discourse analysis of human-human versus human-machine dialogs. However, models trained on datasets based on news articles and web data do not perform well on spoken human-machine dialog, and currently available annotation schemes do not adapt well to dialog data. Therefore, we propose the Spoken Conversation Universal Dependencies (SCUD) annotation scheme that extends the Universal Dependencies (UD) (Nivre et al., 2016) guidelines to spoken human-machine dialogs. We also provide ConvBank, a conversation dataset between humans and an open-domain conversational dialog system with SCUD annotation. Finally, to demonstrate the utility of the dataset, we train a dependency parser on the ConvBank dataset. We demonstrate that by pre-training a dependency parser on a set of larger public datasets and fine-tuning on ConvBank data, we achieved the best result, 85.05% unlabeled and 77.82% labeled attachment accuracy. Show less

Gunrock is the winner of the 2018 Amazon Alexa Prize, as evaluated by coherence and engagement from both real users and Amazon-selected expert conversationalists. We focus on understanding complex sentences and having in-depth conversations in open domains. In this paper, we introduce some innovative system designs and related validation analysis. Overall, we found that users produce longer sentences to Gunrock, which are directly related to users' engagement (e.g., ratings, number of turns)… Show more

Gunrock is the winner of the 2018 Amazon Alexa Prize, as evaluated by coherence and engagement from both real users and Amazon-selected expert conversationalists. We focus on understanding complex sentences and having in-depth conversations in open domains. In this paper, we introduce some innovative system designs and related validation analysis. Overall, we found that users produce longer sentences to Gunrock, which are directly related to users' engagement (e.g., ratings, number of turns). Additionally, users' backstory queries about Gunrock are positively correlated to user satisfaction. Finally, we found dialog flows that interleave facts and personal opinions and stories lead to better user satisfaction. Show less