Where on Earth Do Users Say They Are?: Geo-Entity Linking for Noisy Multilingual User Input

Geo-entity linking is the task of linking a location mention to the real-world geographic location. In this paper we explore the challenging task of geo-entity linking for noisy, multilingual social media data. There are few open-source multilingual geo-entity linking tools available and existing ones are often rule-based, which break easily in social media settings, or LLM-based, which are too expensive for large-scale datasets. We present a method which represents real-world locations as averaged embeddings from labeled user-input location names and allows for selective prediction via an interpretable confidence score. We show that our approach improves geo-entity linking on a global and multilingual social media dataset, and discuss progress and problems with evaluating at different geographic granularities.

A Monte Carlo Language Model Pipeline for Zero-Shot Sociopolitical Event Extraction

We consider dyadic zero-shot event extraction (EE) to identify actions between pairs of actors. The \emph{zero-shot} setting allows social scientists or other non-computational researchers to extract any customized, user-specified set of events without training, resulting in a \emph{dyadic} event database, allowing insight into sociopolitical relational dynamics among actors and the higher level organizations or countries they represent. Unfortunately, we find that current zero-shot EE methods perform poorly for the task, with issues including word sense ambiguity, modality mismatch, and efficiency. Straightforward application of large language model prompting typically performs even worse. We address these challenges with a new fine-grained, multi-stage generative question-answer method, using a Monte Carlo approach to exploit and overcome the randomness of generative outputs. It performs 90\% fewer queries than a previous approach, with strong performance on the widely-used Automatic Content Extraction dataset. Finally, we extend our method to extract affiliations of actor arguments and demonstrate our method and findings on a dyadic international relations case study.

A Comparative Analysis Of Latent Regressor Losses For Singing Voice Conversion

Previous research has shown that established techniques for spoken voice conversion (VC) do not perform as well when applied to singing voice conversion (SVC). We propose an alternative loss component in a loss function that is otherwise well-established among VC tasks, which has been shown to improve our model's SVC performance. We first trained a singer identity embedding (SIE) network on mel-spectrograms of singer recordings to produce singer-specific variance encodings using contrastive learning. We subsequently trained a well-known autoencoder framework (AutoVC) conditioned on these SIEs, and measured differences in SVC performance when using different latent regressor loss components. We found that using this loss w.r.t. SIEs leads to better performance than w.r.t. bottleneck embeddings, where converted audio is more natural and specific towards target singers. The inclusion of this loss component has the advantage of explicitly forcing the network to reconstruct with timbral similarity, and also negates the effect of poor disentanglement in AutoVC's bottleneck embeddings. We demonstrate peculiar diversity between computational and human evaluations on singer-converted audio clips, which highlights the necessity of both. We also propose a pitch-matching mechanism between source and target singers to ensure these evaluations are not influenced by differences in pitch register.

Examining Political Rhetoric with Epistemic Stance Detection

Participants in political discourse employ rhetorical strategies -- such as hedging, attributions, or denials -- to display varying degrees of belief commitments to claims proposed by themselves or others. Traditionally, political scientists have studied these epistemic phenomena through labor-intensive manual content analysis. We propose to help automate such work through epistemic stance prediction, drawn from research in computational semantics, to distinguish at the clausal level what is asserted, denied, or only ambivalently suggested by the author or other mentioned entities (belief holders). We first develop a simple RoBERTa-based model for multi-source stance predictions that outperforms more complex state-of-the-art modeling. Then we demonstrate its novel application to political science by conducting a large-scale analysis of the Mass Market Manifestos corpus of U.S. political opinion books, where we characterize trends in cited belief holders -- respected allies and opposed bogeymen -- across U.S. political ideologies.

ezCoref: Towards Unifying Annotation Guidelines for Coreference Resolution

Large-scale, high-quality corpora are critical for advancing research in coreference resolution. However, existing datasets vary in their definition of coreferences and have been collected via complex and lengthy guidelines that are curated for linguistic experts. These concerns have sparked a growing interest among researchers to curate a unified set of guidelines suitable for annotators with various backgrounds. In this work, we develop a crowdsourcing-friendly coreference annotation methodology, ezCoref, consisting of an annotation tool and an interactive tutorial. We use ezCoref to re-annotate 240 passages from seven existing English coreference datasets (spanning fiction, news, and multiple other domains) while teaching annotators only cases that are treated similarly across these datasets. Surprisingly, we find that reasonable quality annotations were already achievable (>90% agreement between the crowd and expert annotations) even without extensive training. On carefully analyzing the remaining disagreements, we identify the presence of linguistic cases that our annotators unanimously agree upon but lack unified treatments (e.g., generic pronouns, appositives) in existing datasets. We propose the research community should revisit these phenomena when curating future unified annotation guidelines.

Corpus-Guided Contrast Sets for Morphosyntactic Feature Detection in Low-Resource English Varieties

The study of language variation examines how language varies between and within different groups of speakers, shedding light on how we use language to construct identities and how social contexts affect language use. A common method is to identify instances of a certain linguistic feature - say, the zero copula construction - in a corpus, and analyze the feature's distribution across speakers, topics, and other variables, to either gain a qualitative understanding of the feature's function or systematically measure variation. In this paper, we explore the challenging task of automatic morphosyntactic feature detection in low-resource English varieties. We present a human-in-the-loop approach to generate and filter effective contrast sets via corpus-guided edits. We show that our approach improves feature detection for both Indian English and African American English, demonstrate how it can assist linguistic research, and release our fine-tuned models for use by other researchers.

Zero-shot Singing Technique Conversion

In this paper we propose modifications to the neural network framework, AutoVC for the task of singing technique conversion. This includes utilising a pretrained singing technique encoder which extracts technique information, upon which a decoder is conditioned during training. By swapping out a source singer's technique information for that of the target's during conversion, the input spectrogram is reconstructed with the target's technique. We document the beneficial effects of omitting the latent loss, the importance of sequential training, and our process for fine-tuning the bottleneck. We also conducted a listening study where participants rate the specificity of technique-converted voices as well as their naturalness. From this we are able to conclude how effective the technique conversions are and how different conditions affect them, while assessing the model's ability to reconstruct its input data.

An Exploratory Study on Perceptual Spaces of the Singing Voice

Sixty participants provided dissimilarity ratings between various singing techniques. Multidimensional scaling, class averaging and clustering techniques were used to analyse timbral spaces and how they change between different singers, genders and registers. Clustering analysis showed that ground-truth similarity and silhouette scores that were not significantly different between gender or register conditions, while similarity scores were positively correlated with participants' instrumental abilities and task comprehension. Participant feedback showed how a revised study design might mitigate noise in our data, leading to more detailed statistical results. Timbre maps and class distance analysis showed us which singing techniques remained similar to one another across gender and register conditions. This research provides insight into how the timbre space of singing changes under different conditions, highlights the subjectivity of perception between participants, and provides generalised timbre maps for regularisation in machine learning.

Text as Causal Mediators: Research Design for Causal Estimates of Differential Treatment of Social Groups via Language Aspects

Using observed language to understand interpersonal interactions is important in high-stakes decision making. We propose a causal research design for observational (non-experimental) data to estimate the natural direct and indirect effects of social group signals (e.g. race or gender) on speakers' responses with separate aspects of language as causal mediators. We illustrate the promises and challenges of this framework via a theoretical case study of the effect of an advocate's gender on interruptions from justices during U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments. We also discuss challenges conceptualizing and operationalizing causal variables such as gender and language that comprise of many components, and we articulate technical open challenges such as temporal dependence between language mediators in conversational settings.

Corpus-Level Evaluation for Event QA: The IndiaPoliceEvents Corpus Covering the 2002 Gujarat Violence

Automated event extraction in social science applications often requires corpus-level evaluations: for example, aggregating text predictions across metadata and unbiased estimates of recall. We combine corpus-level evaluation requirements with a real-world, social science setting and introduce the IndiaPoliceEvents corpus--all 21,391 sentences from 1,257 English-language Times of India articles about events in the state of Gujarat during March 2002. Our trained annotators read and label every document for mentions of police activity events, allowing for unbiased recall evaluations. In contrast to other datasets with structured event representations, we gather annotations by posing natural questions, and evaluate off-the-shelf models for three different tasks: sentence classification, document ranking, and temporal aggregation of target events. We present baseline results from zero-shot BERT-based models fine-tuned on natural language inference and passage retrieval tasks. Our novel corpus-level evaluations and annotation approach can guide creation of similar social-science-oriented resources in the future.