Sean MacAvaney


2024

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Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024)
Andrew Yates | Bart Desmet | Emily Prud’hommeaux | Ayah Zirikly | Steven Bedrick | Sean MacAvaney | Kfir Bar | Molly Ireland | Yaakov Ophir
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024)

2023

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Effective Contrastive Weighting for Dense Query Expansion
Xiao Wang | Sean MacAvaney | Craig Macdonald | Iadh Ounis
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Verbatim queries submitted to search engines often do not sufficiently describe the user’s search intent. Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) techniques, which modify a query’srepresentation using the top-ranked documents, have been shown to overcome such inadequacies and improve retrieval effectiveness for both lexical methods (e.g., BM25) and dense methods (e.g., ANCE, ColBERT). For instance, the recent ColBERT-PRF approach heuristically chooses new embeddings to add to the query representation using the inverse document frequency (IDF) of the underlying tokens. However, this heuristic potentially ignores the valuable context encoded by the embeddings. In this work, we present a contrastive solution that learns to select the most useful embeddings for expansion. More specifically, a deep language model-based contrastive weighting model, called CWPRF, is trained to learn to discriminate between relevant and non-relevant documents for semantic search. Our experimental results show that our contrastive weighting model can aid to select useful expansion embeddings and outperform various baselines. In particular, CWPRF can improve nDCG@10 by upto to 4.1% compared to an existing PRF approach for ColBERT while maintaining its efficiency.

2022

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ABNIRML: Analyzing the Behavior of Neural IR Models
Sean MacAvaney | Sergey Feldman | Nazli Goharian | Doug Downey | Arman Cohan
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 10

Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT and T5 have established a new state-of-the-art for ad-hoc search. However, it is not yet well understood why these methods are so effective, what makes some variants more effective than others, and what pitfalls they may have. We present a new comprehensive framework for Analyzing the Behavior of Neural IR ModeLs (ABNIRML), which includes new types of diagnostic probes that allow us to test several characteristics—such as writing styles, factuality, sensitivity to paraphrasing and word order—that are not addressed by previous techniques. To demonstrate the value of the framework, we conduct an extensive empirical study that yields insights into the factors that contribute to the neural model’s gains, and identify potential unintended biases the models exhibit. Some of our results confirm conventional wisdom, for example, that recent neural ranking models rely less on exact term overlap with the query, and instead leverage richer linguistic information, evidenced by their higher sensitivity to word and sentence order. Other results are more surprising, such as that some models (e.g., T5 and ColBERT) are biased towards factually correct (rather than simply relevant) texts. Further, some characteristics vary even for the same base language model, and other characteristics can appear due to random variations during model training.1

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TBD3: A Thresholding-Based Dynamic Depression Detection from Social Media for Low-Resource Users
Hrishikesh Kulkarni | Sean MacAvaney | Nazli Goharian | Ophir Frieder
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Social media are heavily used by many users to share their mental health concerns and diagnoses. This trend has turned social media into a large-scale resource for researchers focused on detecting mental health conditions. Social media usage varies considerably across individuals. Thus, classification of patterns, including detecting signs of depression, must account for such variation. We address the disparity in classification effectiveness for users with little activity (e.g., new users). Our evaluation, performed on a large-scale dataset, shows considerable detection discrepancy based on user posting frequency. For instance, the F1 detection score of users with an above-median versus below-median number of posts is greater than double (0.803 vs 0.365) using a conventional CNN-based model; similar results were observed on lexical and transformer-based classifiers. To complement this evaluation, we propose a dynamic thresholding technique that adjusts the classifier’s sensitivity as a function of the number of posts a user has. This technique alone reduces the margin between users with many and few posts, on average, by 45% across all methods and increases overall performance, on average, by 33%. These findings emphasize the importance of evaluating and tuning natural language systems for potentially vulnerable populations.

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Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology
Ayah Zirikly | Dana Atzil-Slonim | Maria Liakata | Steven Bedrick | Bart Desmet | Molly Ireland | Andrew Lee | Sean MacAvaney | Matthew Purver | Rebecca Resnik | Andrew Yates
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology

2021

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ToxCCIn: Toxic Content Classification with Interpretability
Tong Xiang | Sean MacAvaney | Eugene Yang | Nazli Goharian
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

Despite the recent successes of transformer-based models in terms of effectiveness on a variety of tasks, their decisions often remain opaque to humans. Explanations are particularly important for tasks like offensive language or toxicity detection on social media because a manual appeal process is often in place to dispute automatically flagged content. In this work, we propose a technique to improve the interpretability of these models, based on a simple and powerful assumption: a post is at least as toxic as its most toxic span. We incorporate this assumption into transformer models by scoring a post based on the maximum toxicity of its spans and augmenting the training process to identify correct spans. We find this approach effective and can produce explanations that exceed the quality of those provided by Logistic Regression analysis (often regarded as a highly-interpretable model), according to a human study.

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Community-level Research on Suicidality Prediction in a Secure Environment: Overview of the CLPsych 2021 Shared Task
Sean MacAvaney | Anjali Mittu | Glen Coppersmith | Jeff Leintz | Philip Resnik
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access

Progress on NLP for mental health — indeed, for healthcare in general — is hampered by obstacles to shared, community-level access to relevant data. We report on what is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to address this problem in mental health by conducting a shared task using sensitive data in a secure data enclave. Participating teams received access to Twitter posts donated for research, including data from users with and without suicide attempts, and did all work with the dataset entirely within a secure computational environment. We discuss the task, team results, and lessons learned to set the stage for future tasks on sensitive or confidential data.

2020

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SLEDGE-Z: A Zero-Shot Baseline for COVID-19 Literature Search
Sean MacAvaney | Arman Cohan | Nazli Goharian
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

With worldwide concerns surrounding the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), there is a rapidly growing body of scientific literature on the virus. Clinicians, researchers, and policy-makers need to be able to search these articles effectively. In this work, we present a zero-shot ranking algorithm that adapts to COVID-related scientific literature. Our approach filters training data from another collection down to medical-related queries, uses a neural re-ranking model pre-trained on scientific text (SciBERT), and filters the target document collection. This approach ranks top among zero-shot methods on the TREC COVID Round 1 leaderboard, and exhibits a P@5 of 0.80 and an nDCG@10 of 0.68 when evaluated on both Round 1 and 2 judgments. Despite not relying on TREC-COVID data, our method outperforms models that do. As one of the first search methods to thoroughly evaluate COVID-19 search, we hope that this serves as a strong baseline and helps in the global crisis.

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GUIR at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Domain-Tuned Contextualized Models for Offensive Language Detection
Sajad Sotudeh | Tong Xiang | Hao-Ren Yao | Sean MacAvaney | Eugene Yang | Nazli Goharian | Ophir Frieder
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Offensive language detection is an important and challenging task in natural language processing. We present our submissions to the OffensEval 2020 shared task, which includes three English sub-tasks: identifying the presence of offensive language (Sub-task A), identifying the presence of target in offensive language (Sub-task B), and identifying the categories of the target (Sub-task C). Our experiments explore using a domain-tuned contextualized language model (namely, BERT) for this task. We also experiment with different components and configurations (e.g., a multi-view SVM) stacked upon BERT models for specific sub-tasks. Our submissions achieve F1 scores of 91.7% in Sub-task A, 66.5% in Sub-task B, and 63.2% in Sub-task C. We perform an ablation study which reveals that domain tuning considerably improves the classification performance. Furthermore, error analysis shows common misclassification errors made by our model and outlines research directions for future.

2018

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RSDD-Time: Temporal Annotation of Self-Reported Mental Health Diagnoses
Sean MacAvaney | Bart Desmet | Arman Cohan | Luca Soldaini | Andrew Yates | Ayah Zirikly | Nazli Goharian
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Keyboard to Clinic

Self-reported diagnosis statements have been widely employed in studying language related to mental health in social media. However, existing research has largely ignored the temporality of mental health diagnoses. In this work, we introduce RSDD-Time: a new dataset of 598 manually annotated self-reported depression diagnosis posts from Reddit that include temporal information about the diagnosis. Annotations include whether a mental health condition is present and how recently the diagnosis happened. Furthermore, we include exact temporal spans that relate to the date of diagnosis. This information is valuable for various computational methods to examine mental health through social media because one’s mental health state is not static. We also test several baseline classification and extraction approaches, which suggest that extracting temporal information from self-reported diagnosis statements is challenging.

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SMHD: a Large-Scale Resource for Exploring Online Language Usage for Multiple Mental Health Conditions
Arman Cohan | Bart Desmet | Andrew Yates | Luca Soldaini | Sean MacAvaney | Nazli Goharian
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Mental health is a significant and growing public health concern. As language usage can be leveraged to obtain crucial insights into mental health conditions, there is a need for large-scale, labeled, mental health-related datasets of users who have been diagnosed with one or more of such conditions. In this paper, we investigate the creation of high-precision patterns to identify self-reported diagnoses of nine different mental health conditions, and obtain high-quality labeled data without the need for manual labelling. We introduce the SMHD (Self-reported Mental Health Diagnoses) dataset and make it available. SMHD is a novel large dataset of social media posts from users with one or multiple mental health conditions along with matched control users. We examine distinctions in users’ language, as measured by linguistic and psychological variables. We further explore text classification methods to identify individuals with mental conditions through their language.

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GU IRLAB at SemEval-2018 Task 7: Tree-LSTMs for Scientific Relation Classification
Sean MacAvaney | Luca Soldaini | Arman Cohan | Nazli Goharian
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

SemEval 2018 Task 7 focuses on relation extraction and classification in scientific literature. In this work, we present our tree-based LSTM network for this shared task. Our approach placed 9th (of 28) for subtask 1.1 (relation classification), and 5th (of 20) for subtask 1.2 (relation classification with noisy entities). We also provide an ablation study of features included as input to the network.

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A Deeper Look into Dependency-Based Word Embeddings
Sean MacAvaney | Amir Zeldes
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

We investigate the effect of various dependency-based word embeddings on distinguishing between functional and domain similarity, word similarity rankings, and two downstream tasks in English. Variations include word embeddings trained using context windows from Stanford and Universal dependencies at several levels of enhancement (ranging from unlabeled, to Enhanced++ dependencies). Results are compared to basic linear contexts and evaluated on several datasets. We found that embeddings trained with Universal and Stanford dependency contexts excel at different tasks, and that enhanced dependencies often improve performance.

2017

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GUIR at SemEval-2017 Task 12: A Framework for Cross-Domain Clinical Temporal Information Extraction
Sean MacAvaney | Arman Cohan | Nazli Goharian
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017)

Clinical TempEval 2017 (SemEval 2017 Task 12) addresses the task of cross-domain temporal extraction from clinical text. We present a system for this task that uses supervised learning for the extraction of temporal expression and event spans with corresponding attributes and narrative container relations. Approaches include conditional random fields and decision tree ensembles, using lexical, syntactic, semantic, distributional, and rule-based features. Our system received best or second best scores in TIMEX3 span, EVENT span, and CONTAINS relation extraction.