The Promises and Pitfalls of Using Language Models to Measure Instruction Quality in Education

Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers' expertise and idiosyncratic factors, preventing teachers from getting timely and frequent feedback. Different from prior research that mostly focuses on low-inference instructional practices on a singular basis, this paper presents the first study that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to assess multiple high-inference instructional practices in two distinct educational settings: in-person K-12 classrooms and simulated performance tasks for pre-service teachers. This is also the first study that applies NLP to measure a teaching practice that is widely acknowledged to be particularly effective for students with special needs. We confront two challenges inherent in NLP-based instructional analysis, including noisy and long input data and highly skewed distributions of human ratings. Our results suggest that pretrained Language Models (PLMs) demonstrate performances comparable to the agreement level of human raters for variables that are more discrete and require lower inference, but their efficacy diminishes with more complex teaching practices. Interestingly, using only teachers' utterances as input yields strong results for student-centered variables, alleviating common concerns over the difficulty of collecting and transcribing high-quality student speech data in in-person teaching settings. Our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of current NLP techniques in the education domain, opening avenues for further exploration.

Large Language Models and Causal Inference in Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey

Causal inference has shown potential in enhancing the predictive accuracy, fairness, robustness, and explainability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models by capturing causal relationships among variables. The emergence of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted various NLP domains, particularly through their advanced reasoning capabilities. This survey focuses on evaluating and improving LLMs from a causal view in the following areas: understanding and improving the LLMs' reasoning capacity, addressing fairness and safety issues in LLMs, complementing LLMs with explanations, and handling multimodality. Meanwhile, LLMs' strong reasoning capacities can in turn contribute to the field of causal inference by aiding causal relationship discovery and causal effect estimations. This review explores the interplay between causal inference frameworks and LLMs from both perspectives, emphasizing their collective potential to further the development of more advanced and equitable artificial intelligence systems.

From Adoption to Adaption: Tracing the Diffusion of New Emojis on Twitter

In the rapidly evolving landscape of social media, the introduction of new emojis in Unicode release versions presents a structured opportunity to explore digital language evolution. Analyzing a large dataset of sampled English tweets, we examine how newly released emojis gain traction and evolve in meaning. We find that community size of early adopters and emoji semantics are crucial in determining their popularity. Certain emojis experienced notable shifts in the meanings and sentiment associations during the diffusion process. Additionally, we propose a novel framework utilizing language models to extract words and pre-existing emojis with semantically similar contexts, which enhances interpretation of new emojis. The framework demonstrates its effectiveness in improving sentiment classification performance by substituting unknown new emojis with familiar ones. This study offers a new perspective in understanding how new language units are adopted, adapted, and integrated into the fabric of online communication.

Emojis Decoded: Leveraging ChatGPT for Enhanced Understanding in Social Media Communications

Emojis, which encapsulate semantics beyond mere words or phrases, have become prevalent in social network communications. This has spurred increasing scholarly interest in exploring their attributes and functionalities. However, emoji-related research and application face two primary challenges. First, researchers typically rely on crowd-sourcing to annotate emojis in order to understand their sentiments, usage intentions, and semantic meanings. Second, subjective interpretations by users can often lead to misunderstandings of emojis and cause the communication barrier. Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in various annotation tasks, with ChatGPT demonstrating expertise across multiple domains. In our study, we assess ChatGPT's effectiveness in handling previously annotated and downstream tasks. Our objective is to validate the hypothesis that ChatGPT can serve as a viable alternative to human annotators in emoji research and that its ability to explain emoji meanings can enhance clarity and transparency in online communications. Our findings indicate that ChatGPT has extensive knowledge of emojis. It is adept at elucidating the meaning of emojis across various application scenarios and demonstrates the potential to replace human annotators in a range of tasks.

Fast Butterfly-Core Community Search For Large Labeled Graphs

Community Search (CS) aims to identify densely interconnected subgraphs corresponding to query vertices within a graph. However, existing heterogeneous graph-based community search methods need help identifying cross-group communities and suffer from efficiency issues, making them unsuitable for large graphs. This paper presents a fast community search model based on the Butterfly-Core Community (BCC) structure for heterogeneous graphs. The Random Walk with Restart (RWR) algorithm and butterfly degree comprehensively evaluate the importance of vertices within communities, allowing leader vertices to be rapidly updated to maintain cross-group cohesion. Moreover, we devised a more efficient method for updating vertex distances, which minimizes vertex visits and enhances operational efficiency. Extensive experiments on several real-world temporal graphs demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this solution.

An Effective Index for Truss-based Community Search on Large Directed Graphs

Community search is a derivative of community detection that enables online and personalized discovery of communities and has found extensive applications in massive real-world networks. Recently, there needs to be more focus on the community search issue within directed graphs, even though substantial research has been carried out on undirected graphs. The recently proposed D-truss model has achieved good results in the quality of retrieved communities. However, existing D-truss-based work cannot perform efficient community searches on large graphs because it consumes too many computing resources to retrieve the maximal D-truss. To overcome this issue, we introduce an innovative merge relation known as D-truss-connected to capture the inherent density and cohesiveness of edges within D-truss. This relation allows us to partition all the edges in the original graph into a series of D-truss-connected classes. Then, we construct a concise and compact index, ConDTruss, based on D-truss-connected. Using ConDTruss, the efficiency of maximum D-truss retrieval will be greatly improved, making it a theoretically optimal approach. Experimental evaluations conducted on large directed graph certificate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

A Two-Stage Multimodal Emotion Recognition Model Based on Graph Contrastive Learning

In terms of human-computer interaction, it is becoming more and more important to correctly understand the user's emotional state in a conversation, so the task of multimodal emotion recognition (MER) started to receive more attention. However, existing emotion classification methods usually perform classification only once. Sentences are likely to be misclassified in a single round of classification. Previous work usually ignores the similarities and differences between different morphological features in the fusion process. To address the above issues, we propose a two-stage emotion recognition model based on graph contrastive learning (TS-GCL). First, we encode the original dataset with different preprocessing modalities. Second, a graph contrastive learning (GCL) strategy is introduced for these three modal data with other structures to learn similarities and differences within and between modalities. Finally, we use MLP twice to achieve the final emotion classification. This staged classification method can help the model to better focus on different levels of emotional information, thereby improving the performance of the model. Extensive experiments show that TS-GCL has superior performance on IEMOCAP and MELD datasets compared with previous methods.

Adversarial Representation with Intra-Modal and Inter-Modal Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

With the release of increasing open-source emotion recognition datasets on social media platforms and the rapid development of computing resources, multimodal emotion recognition tasks (MER) have begun to receive widespread research attention. The MER task extracts and fuses complementary semantic information from different modalities, which can classify the speaker's emotions. However, the existing feature fusion methods have usually mapped the features of different modalities into the same feature space for information fusion, which can not eliminate the heterogeneity between different modalities. Therefore, it is challenging to make the subsequent emotion class boundary learning. To tackle the above problems, we have proposed a novel Adversarial Representation with Intra-Modal and Inter-Modal Graph Contrastive for Multimodal Emotion Recognition (AR-IIGCN) method. Firstly, we input video, audio, and text features into a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to map them into separate feature spaces. Secondly, we build a generator and a discriminator for the three modal features through adversarial representation, which can achieve information interaction between modalities and eliminate heterogeneity among modalities. Thirdly, we introduce contrastive graph representation learning to capture intra-modal and inter-modal complementary semantic information and learn intra-class and inter-class boundary information of emotion categories. Specifically, we construct a graph structure for three modal features and perform contrastive representation learning on nodes with different emotions in the same modality and the same emotion in different modalities, which can improve the feature representation ability of nodes. Extensive experimental works show that the ARL-IIGCN method can significantly improve emotion recognition accuracy on IEMOCAP and MELD datasets.

DER-GCN: Dialogue and Event Relation-Aware Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Multimodal Dialogue Emotion Recognition

With the continuous development of deep learning (DL), the task of multimodal dialogue emotion recognition (MDER) has recently received extensive research attention, which is also an essential branch of DL. The MDER aims to identify the emotional information contained in different modalities, e.g., text, video, and audio, in different dialogue scenes. However, existing research has focused on modeling contextual semantic information and dialogue relations between speakers while ignoring the impact of event relations on emotion. To tackle the above issues, we propose a novel Dialogue and Event Relation-Aware Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Multimodal Emotion Recognition (DER-GCN) method. It models dialogue relations between speakers and captures latent event relations information. Specifically, we construct a weighted multi-relationship graph to simultaneously capture the dependencies between speakers and event relations in a dialogue. Moreover, we also introduce a Self-Supervised Masked Graph Autoencoder (SMGAE) to improve the fusion representation ability of features and structures. Next, we design a new Multiple Information Transformer (MIT) to capture the correlation between different relations, which can provide a better fuse of the multivariate information between relations. Finally, we propose a loss optimization strategy based on contrastive learning to enhance the representation learning ability of minority class features. We conduct extensive experiments on the IEMOCAP and MELD benchmark datasets, which verify the effectiveness of the DER-GCN model. The results demonstrate that our model significantly improves both the average accuracy and the f1 value of emotion recognition.

Deep Imbalanced Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations

The main task of Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (MERC) is to identify the emotions in modalities, e.g., text, audio, image and video, which is a significant development direction for realizing machine intelligence. However, many data in MERC naturally exhibit an imbalanced distribution of emotion categories, and researchers ignore the negative impact of imbalanced data on emotion recognition. To tackle this problem, we systematically analyze it from three aspects: data augmentation, loss sensitivity, and sampling strategy, and propose the Class Boundary Enhanced Representation Learning (CBERL) model. Concretely, we first design a multimodal generative adversarial network to address the imbalanced distribution of {emotion} categories in raw data. Secondly, a deep joint variational autoencoder is proposed to fuse complementary semantic information across modalities and obtain discriminative feature representations. Finally, we implement a multi-task graph neural network with mask reconstruction and classification optimization to solve the problem of overfitting and underfitting in class boundary learning, and achieve cross-modal emotion recognition. We have conducted extensive experiments on the IEMOCAP and MELD benchmark datasets, and the results show that CBERL has achieved a certain performance improvement in the effectiveness of emotion recognition. Especially on the minority class fear and disgust emotion labels, our model improves the accuracy and F1 value by 10% to 20%.