Ian Stewart


2023

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Democratizing Machine Learning for Interdisciplinary Scholars: Reflections on the NLP+CSS Tutorial Series
Ian Stewart | Katherine Keith
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Teaching for NLP

2022

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FIBER: Fill-in-the-Blanks as a Challenging Video Understanding Evaluation Framework
Santiago Castro | Ruoyao Wang | Pingxuan Huang | Ian Stewart | Oana Ignat | Nan Liu | Jonathan Stroud | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We propose fill-in-the-blanks as a video understanding evaluation framework and introduce FIBER – a novel dataset consisting of 28,000 videos and descriptions in support of this evaluation framework. The fill-in-the-blanks setting tests a model’s understanding of a video by requiring it to predict a masked noun phrase in the caption of the video, given the video and the surrounding text. The FIBER benchmark does not share the weaknesses of the current state-of-the-art language-informed video understanding tasks, namely: (1) video question answering using multiple-choice questions, where models perform relatively well because they exploit linguistic biases in the task formulation, thus making our framework challenging for the current state-of-the-art systems to solve; and (2) video captioning, which relies on an open-ended evaluation framework that is often inaccurate because system answers may be perceived as incorrect if they differ in form from the ground truth. The FIBER dataset and our code are available at https://lit.eecs.umich.edu/fiber/.

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How Well Do You Know Your Audience? Toward Socially-aware Question Generation
Ian Stewart | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

When writing, a person may need to anticipate questions from their audience, but different social groups may ask very different types of questions. If someone is writing about a problem they want to resolve, what kind of follow-up question will a domain expert ask, and could the writer better address the expert’s information needs by rewriting their original post? In this paper, we explore the task of socially-aware question generation. We collect a data set of questions and posts from social media, including background information about the question-askers’ social groups. We find that different social groups, such as experts and novices, consistently ask different types of questions. We train several text-generation models that incorporate social information, and we find that a discrete social-representation model outperforms the text-only model when different social groups ask highly different questions from one another. Our work provides a framework for developing text generation models that can help writers anticipate the information expectations of highly different social groups.

2021

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Tuiteamos o pongamos un tuit? Investigating the Social Constraints of Loanword Integration in Spanish Social Media
Ian Stewart | Diyi Yang | Jacob Eisenstein
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2021

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Room to Grow: Understanding Personal Characteristics Behind Self Improvement Using Social Media
MeiXing Dong | Xueming Xu | Yiwei Zhang | Ian Stewart | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media

Many people aim for change, but not everyone succeeds. While there are a number of social psychology theories that propose motivation-related characteristics of those who persist with change, few computational studies have explored the motivational stage of personal change. In this paper, we investigate a new dataset consisting of the writings of people who manifest intention to change, some of whom persist while others do not. Using a variety of linguistic analysis techniques, we first examine the writing patterns that distinguish the two groups of people. Persistent people tend to reference more topics related to long-term self-improvement and use a more complicated writing style. Drawing on these consistent differences, we build a classifier that can reliably identify the people more likely to persist, based on their language. Our experiments provide new insights into the motivation-related behavior of people who persist with their intention to change.

2018

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Making “fetch” happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on nonstandard word growth and decline
Ian Stewart | Jacob Eisenstein
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In an online community, new words come and go: today’s “haha” may be replaced by tomorrow’s “lol.” Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the grammatical system in which it takes part. To investigate the role of social and structural factors in language change, we undertake a large-scale analysis of the frequencies of non-standard words in Reddit. Dissemination across many linguistic contexts is a predictor of success: words that appear in more linguistic contexts grow faster and survive longer. Furthermore, social dissemination plays a less important role in explaining word growth and decline than previously hypothesized.

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Si O No, Que Penses? Catalonian Independence and Linguistic Identity on Social Media
Ian Stewart | Yuval Pinter | Jacob Eisenstein
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)

Political identity is often manifested in language variation, but the relationship between the two is still relatively unexplored from a quantitative perspective. This study examines the use of Catalan, a language local to the semi-autonomous region of Catalonia in Spain, on Twitter in discourse related to the 2017 independence referendum. We corroborate prior findings that pro-independence tweets are more likely to include the local language than anti-independence tweets. We also find that Catalan is used more often in referendum-related discourse than in other contexts, contrary to prior findings on language variation. This suggests a strong role for the Catalan language in the expression of Catalonian political identity.

2014

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Now We Stronger than Ever: African-American English Syntax in Twitter
Ian Stewart
Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop at the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics